Nothing funny about feldspar

Every year Plagioclase’s mother goes through “jigsaw season.” This starts shortly after Christmas and goes until she’s gotten sick of it — usually after three or four puzzles.

She’s pretty specific about what kind of puzzles she likes: 500 pieces, flowers and scenic vistas, photos and not illustrations. However, we’ve been buying puzzles at the local thrift shop, so the selection is sometimes limited. Currently we’re working on a 1000 piece puzzle of a field of opuntia and ocotillo.

I say “we” because she’s not particularly fast at doing puzzles, and I am irresistibly drawn to them¹ so I help her out. I try hard to keep from taking over the puzzle, but sometimes she makes it difficult. She doesn’t work puzzles in any way that makes sense to me (except that she does do the border first). She will put all of the pieces on the table, even if they don’t fit, piling them roughly in colors and leaving no space to actually place any completed blocks. Instead of working on the easy parts (areas with lots of identifiable edges), she will start in the lower edge and look for one piece that fits in one space. Then she will make a remark like “I sat there for over an hour and got only two pieces!” In the meantime I’ve put together big swaths of sky or something and moved on… I wonder sometimes if she gets annoyed by my assistance, but she would never tell me if she was.

This particular puzzle has the added difficulty of weird shapes. You know, the ones where the pieces don’t meet in nice regular patterns, like the Four Corners area, but instead are more like New England. I always thought the “Four Corners” puzzles were more difficult, because the pieces tend to be shaped all alike, but I realized that the “New England” puzzles are harder because you can’t depend on knowing the shape of a connecting piece until you actually get it placed.

Darn. I was hoping that spending time writing this would make me not want to go work on the puzzle. Didn’t work.

1. I like to sort things, too, very much like a witch but witches count things.↩