Puzzle Connections

            A challenge. A strategy. Logic. Sorting. A puzzle. These things have always been there to connect my family. The struggle of mismatched pieces and the joy of bringing them together has always been a central pastime in my family. 

My dad introduced my younger brother and I to wooden puzzles at a young age. I remember sitting down on my knees so my small arms could reach the pieces that were spread everywhere on our old round kitchen table. My excitement was bubbling. We had the whole day just for this. My dad got out the wood glue, and I remember feeling so cool because I got to use special glue. We had to hold the pieces in place while the glue dried or fell apart, making us glue it again. I had so much fun with my family and would ask for these wooden puzzles every birthday or Christmas. We made models of houses, castles, music box pianos, and more. I love these memories, so I still have the models displayed on my bookshelf for me to see everyday. 

This experience shaped my childhood. It taught me problem solving skills and creativity when we broke a piece or lost one. It taught me how to put pieces together logically, how to read instructions, and how to use the oh so special glue. And of course, my brother and I would occasionally argue, especially over who got to do what, so these puzzles also helped us learn and grow together. 

As we got older, our wooden puzzle-making started dying out. 

Then once upon a pandemic, I ordered a jigsaw puzzle off of Amazon. It was a thousand pieces. A unicorn in the midst of a rainbow paradise. I put it on our square kitchen table and worked on it for hours on end. I was trapped by the challenge. I couldn’t stop because I always wanted to do “just one more” piece, the same phrase I’ve said for countless things like chapters in a book, an episode on Netflix, or a piece of candy. Puzzles were my new obsession. Once I finished, I ordered another. 

As I was at this for hours a day in a central location of the house, my family was often in the presence of the puzzle. Then they started joining in, especially my grandma. I loved when my grandma joined me. She took it as a challenge and devoted hours a day to it, similarly having few other things to do while stuck in a house. Once my dad saw us doing it together, he started ordering puzzles for us. But they kept increasing in size. We may have started with 1000 pieces, but we got up to 5000 (granted, the 5000 piece puzzle was split into three bags/sections by default, so we left it that way). They started to be just forests of what seemed like the same tree over and over again, so my grandma began sorting by the shapes of the pieces while I tried to decipher the colors. She even started naming parts of the pieces. The round parts that stuck out were called heads and the rectangular parts that stuck out were called feet. Together, they made tiny little people. But if there was only one head, it might be a tower instead. 

Puzzles gave my grandma and I something to do together while we talked or listened to music, and sometimes my parents would join in too. The logic I had learned all those years before with my dad was being used again. As the pandemic ended, I started to hang out with friends again but to the point where I was neglecting puzzles without realizing it. I thought they were boring and tedious because they were all green. But I hadn’t realized doing puzzles isn’t what made puzzles special; spending time with my family is what did.