I almost feel like I’ve hit my stride – another amazing day of progress 🙂 I may need those Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs songs sooner than I thought!

Thinking of my grandmother today, it’s the 2nd anniversary of her passing. She is the one who got me started doing jigsaw puzzles. It seemed she always had a jigsaw puzzle going, and she didn’t mind little kids grabbing pieces and trying to help her out. She would become completely absorbed in them and sometimes stayed up all night working on them. I remember spending the night at her house, kissing her goodnight as she sat in her chair with a jigsaw puzzle laid out on a board on the footstool. Woke up the next morning and there she was, in the same spot, working the same puzzle! When I was little I thought it would be so great to be a grownup and stay awake all night doing a puzzle if I wanted to. It is nice!

She was only able to work 300 piece puzzles in her later years, failing eyesight and dexterity; but she was a lover of jigsaws to the end. Sometimes I think of all the choices we have now, all the different puzzle companies around the world that we have easy access to because of the internet – it makes me kind of sad that she never got to try some of those puzzles of amazing quality like Ravensburger, Jumbo, Heye, Schmidt. She wasn’t a collector, she just enjoyed doing the puzzles and bought what was available to us in our small town. Milton Bradley is one brand that comes to mind, whatever she could get at the dime store, etc.

I’m thankful to her for getting me started working puzzles when I was young. It’s a hobby that I love, especially now when I am unable to work and have lots of time to fill. I miss her, but every puzzle I do makes me think of her and smile. What would she think of my enormous puzzle? Probably she’d laugh and say “good luck sweetie!”