In October of 2023, I wrote a column here about how I came to be doing jigsaw puzzles—every day!—with my wife, Wendy, something I could never have imagined. We were married in 1968, at the age of twenty, but although Wendy did puzzles with our children, I did not; clear back when I was a kid myself, I discovered that I wasn’t good at sorting out shapes (an understatement). So when, thanks to the inspiration of our daughter Katy, I began working on puzzles with Wendy in 2022, a little more than a year before I wrote that column, I was not merely a novice—I was a congenitally inept one. And yet, as if in some inspirational tale appearing in a devotional magazine, my aging brain, given motivation and Wendy’s encouraging company, gradually adapted, and I achieved at least a minimal competence.
As I recounted a year ago, Wendy and I started doing mostly 1000-piece puzzles, but after a while those became too hard for her. We shifted to a mix of 500-piece puzzles—ones that were clearly segmented, with neat rows of exotic postage stamps or cats or travel posters and such—and 300-piece sets, in which the individual puzzle pieces are noticeably larger. We especially love the puzzles featuring the genial Americana of Charles Wysocki.
Thanksgiving is on my mind this week, of course, and I find myself deeply thankful for Katy’s prompting, two years ago. I’m thankful for the art and craft of the puzzle-makers, and the companies that make these diversions (some more artfully than others). I’m thankful as well that in this ever-morphing media environment, dinosaurs like us (with our shelves of CDs, piles of DVDs, and so on) can still putter along on our familiar tracks.
A few months ago, our puzzling saga entered a new phase. It has become harder for Wendy to find the right place for this or that piece. Frequently, she’s inclined to “make” a piece fit. The better-crafted ones are designed so that this is less likely, but still, it can happen with any puzzle we start on, whether an old favorite or one we’ve never done before (like the one we currently have in progress).
Our omnicompetent daughter Anna, eldest of our four grown children, arrived on Sunday from Missoula for a Thanksgiving visit. Last night, she, Wendy, and I were working on our latest puzzle, a 300-piecer influenced by Wyscocki, one we haven’t done before. Katy and I acquired it “used” along with several others at a recent books-and-crafts sale held by the blessed Wheaton Public Library. While Anna is here, we will collectively take on a 1000-piecer (something we no longer do on our own)—perhaps a gorgeous one featuring Hercule Poirot, which my brother, Rick, sent to us recently. There’s also one centering on Jane Marple just out, I hear, and we have a lavish 1000-piecer devoted to Agatha Christie across the board, which we did on another occasion when Anna was visiting.
The companionship and the routine of our puzzling are comforting. (I am a great lover of routine, perhaps to excess.) Above all, as I suggested when I wrote that column a year ago, we are thankful for the blessed order that even a 300-piece jigsaw puzzle (decidedly “corny” in the judgment of many observers, and trivial to boot) instantiates. We proceed in the faith that, ultimately, everything will “fit” in the grand scheme of things, everything will have its place, and from the heap of pieces we pour out onto the card table an ordered scene will take shape, a microcosm of the whole shebang in which we too are part of the picture. Hence at Thanksgiving we look back and ahead at the same—we look forward to the Great Feast. May it be so.
John Wilson is a contributing editor for the Englewood Review of Books and senior editor at the Marginalia Review of Books.
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Image by Scouten, from Wikimedia Commons, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
