Puzzled

Yes, I'm puzzled by our goofy, misguided, vacuous society, and I hope to join the Occupy Lawrence gatherings as soon as I can, but that's not what this is about. This is about jigsaw puzzles.

I've always loved doing them, studying shapes, finding groups of colors, and puzzling out how they fit together. Early memories are vague, but somewhere along the line our family acquired a holiday tradition of having a jigsaw puzzle going in my sewing room. Then I developed rheumatoid arthritis and needed surgeries to repair wrecked joints. Nothing held my interest during recuperation better than a jigsaw puzzle.  When I began to spend winters on the Gulf of Mexico -- in Galveston and Biloxi -- jigsaw puzzles helped entertain me on chilly days or evenings alone.

For this surgery I chose a puzzle made from a John Singer Sargent painting. I learned a lot about Sargent's style and technique -- his layering of color and feathery strokes. Sorry I didn't take a picture of the assembled puzzle. I passed it on to Linda, who, in turn has loaned me a Monet.

When Leslie visited, she brought on loan two antique puzzles, one of which is these colorful parrots.

Here's the thing about jigsaw puzzles: putting them together gives us a sense of accomplishment, of having solved a problem, of bringing order out of chaos. If only it were that easy to put our fractured society back together!

For the history of jigsaw puzzles, go to http://mgcpuzzle.com/mgcpuzzles/puzzle_history/.