"It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire." - Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
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I shimmied the purple-sided puzzle box open and spilled the contents onto my dining table. It was a 300 piece puzzle made by Pomegranate Kids, and I was eager to be one. I propped the box on the window sill and began sorting the colors, corners, and sides into piles of various sizes. I loved jigsaw puzzles, especially this one. I had grown up on playing puzzles on the computer and on the counter top, so conquering a Pomegranate Kid's puzzle didn't seem to shake me at the time. I found this particular box when I snooped around Half-Priced-Books a couple weeks ago and weighed the difficulty between a 1000 and 300 piece puzzle. You can guess which one I chose. Great puzzle-players will tell you to start from the corners and then find the edges. I like to start where the colors are the most vibrant. To me, the round oranges were the first to be linked. It did not take long to place the colors together, and so I moved onto the woman at the bottom. She was easy to piece together, and it made me wonder, "If I had met this woman, would she be easy to piece together too?" Her face was fairly rudimentary in design, but I thought she looked adventurous and whimsical. Who else would trek through a forest of oranges larger than your face and flowers the size of two men? After creating the outline, I decided the flower petals shall be stitched together, and then their long stalks. I had quite the difficulty with the shrubbery. The grass and the leaves were the same color, and so I relied more on shoving pieces together than analyzing the colors. It made me frustrated. Here was a decent artwork painted by a self-taught man, and I was jamming the knots and crevices together like a self-fed baby. I wanted to replicate his painting, not create my own! Ah, but I managed to finish late in the night, my competitive nature besting me once more. I had told others I would finish it, and finish it I would! When people ask me about my puzzle skills, they do not ask about why I do it, they just ask how fast I put it together. I do it because I love the process of clicking an unruly piece into place. I do it because I love the escape it gives me--how I entered the exotic forest and came out unscathed. I do it because I like to think that Henri Rousseau's Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest (1905) was just as meaningful to him as it was to me. I liked her. She is one of the few that listen to my thoughts and let the jungle be a jungle. "Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle." - Lewis Carroll |
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September 2020
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