Sixteen Pieces Missing
On Christmas Eve, I put a puzzle on my living room coffee table. It was a holiday puzzle that I’d never done before, fresh from its sealed box and bag. Santa and his reindeer flying over a snowy pine tree covered landscape, below a full moon and the northern lights.
It’s actually the first puzzle I’ve done in a while, and nearly a year since I worked on one in my house. There was a puzzle with black bear cubs, built in a cabin in the woods during early summer. And a camping, forest critters scene put together on my dining room table before the buds of spring. But that was it. A far, far cry from my 2020 puzzle count.
When summer vacation ended and I went back to work last fall, time for puzzles was one of the first things to go. Then went some of the hours for reading and writing every day. And then more subtly, as my calendar became more scheduled, the consistent freedom to run whenever in the day and as much as I wanted went too.
There is still time to do all of it. Spend time every day with words and explore miles of neighborhood and parks on foot. Spend a morning baking. An evening playing a game or working on a puzzle. There is just more things to spread my time between these days, so my time needs to be deliberate. And less of each has been fine. Less is so much better than none.
So finally, Christmas Eve. The beginning of a long weekend with little to do except spend time at home. All gifts already bought and wrapped under the tree, or under other trees in other states. No work and no obligations. Just a batch of cookies to bake and a quick trip to the grocery store for Christmas night dinner.
Fresh brewed coffee in my fox mug, I started the holiday puzzle. I start every puzzle by sorting the edge pieces from the rest. I put together most of the border first, then work my way through the middle. You are bound to always miss a few edges on your first sort, but it doesn’t matter much really. You get the general frame, and you can fill in the remaining holes as you go.
After my first pass at building the frame, I could feel something was a little off with this puzzle construction process. Not only did I feel like I was missing several more edge pieces than I usually do, but it felt like they all might be clustered to one corner of the puzzle. It felt normal to be missing a few pieces. But it felt bizarre for all the missing ones to be from the same spot.
Undeterred by knowing my puzzle would likely be finished incomplete, I began to fill in the middle. I decided to start with Santa and his sleigh, looking for the missing edge pieces as I hunted for reds, greens, and golds. Before I filled in the reindeer and the moon, I knew with certainty that there were definitely going to be pieces missing from my completed puzzle.
How many pieces would be missing? How were they not there? Where in the puzzle were they missing from? I had opened a sealed box with a sealed plastic bag inside when I started the building process. And by the halfway point, I was confident that all the missing pieces were going to be isolated to the bottom left corner.
There was only one way to know for sure though. I had to do the best I could with the pieces in front of me to complete the festive picture. It felt like a metaphor in a way, for so many things. A metaphor for the past year and feeling like I’m leaving a lot of things I wanted to do at least partly incomplete. A metaphor for the holidays and all of us out there who’s festive puzzle will always have missing pieces. And a million different metaphors of almost.
It’s just how it goes most of the time. Life is both brutal and wonderful. Both heartbreaking and worth every ache. Beautiful because of the broken that shows us how to see the amazing. We are all a little incomplete and doing the best we can with what we have. It’s just not usually so evident, like in sixteen pieces missing from the same corner a brand new puzzle.
