When I was younger, my favorite way to spend a rainy Saturday was to sleep in, leave my pajamas on all afternoon and help my grandmother piece together jigsaw puzzles. Those lazy days always started in the same way; I would wake up and hear the sound of rain ping-ping-pinging on the tin roof of my grandmother’s house, and suddenly realized with horror that my whole day would be effectively ruined with every drop. When I could no longer stay in bed, I would wrap myself in my favorite fuzzy blue blanket and stomp my way toward the living room.
I would pause briefly in the kitchen to slide across the linoleum floor in my sock feet going about warp 4 before crashing into the cupboard. Gran would leave my cereal bowl and box of Lucky Charms sitting beside a half carton of milk and a clean dishtowel in expectation of the spilled milk over flowing from the sugar-infused breakfast that I was about to consume.
Once safely positioned in front of the Saturday morning cartoons, I would inhale my tub-sized portion of the dried marshmallow goodness while Gargamel and his trusty feline side-kick, sought to boil little blue hermaphrodites down into gold. Coincidentally, Smurf-hunting was my initial foray into get-rich quick schemes, which seemed unlikely, given the current weather conditions plaguing my neighborhood.
With no let-up in sight, and after some initial urging, those rainy afternoons were spent piecing irregular shaped cardboard pictures into cohesive pieces of art. The real Empire State Building took 410 days to erect. However, with the warm comfort of fuzzy socks, the picture from the front of the box, and my grandmother’s help, it took only a few hours to construct my one dimensional replica. In Gran’s living room, Stonehenge, the Arc de Triumph, and even puppies in Christmas hats were constructed and dismantled in a single afternoon.
As I grew older, the routine of sliding across a worn linoleum floor changed with my choices in breakfast foods. Pre-sweetened and processed cereal became a plain bagel with cream cheese and coffee. I no longer wanted to profit from the suffering of Smurfs and those cartoons were replaced with pre-teen dramas like Saved by the Bell. The older that I became, the more I began to relish those afternoons with my grandmother rebuilding the Great Pyramids.
Over tiny puzzle pieces, my grandmother would share her thoughts on everything from politics to Pat Sajak and would occasionally throw in her rules for romantic predicaments.
These days there are a lot of people with a lot of opinions about love. What it is, what it’s not, how to hold on or when to let go. Rainy Saturdays spent piecing puzzles taught me a great lesson…Love is finding that one person who takes your pieces, all mixed-up and disjointed, and gives them back to you, put together.
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