I completed three others in the month before that. And there are rules. If I start one on my own, my boyfriend is prohibited from helping me complete it. If we begin one together, we generously take turns letting every other set the previous piece.
"But looking at the picture is," my boyfriend in, complicating matters.
As for me, I find the practice of sorting through bits and constructing puzzles similar to meditation. Jigsaws require a singular focus that briefly supplies my mind with a reprieve from outside anxieties. What is more, the picture is totally irrelevant. After emerging from a few hours working on a puzzle, no matter what it is, I feel significantly more relaxed than when I began.
We are not the only ones fixing puzzles that seriously. Jigsaw mania is in full swing everywhere. In the first weeks of shelter-in-place, Google hunts for puzzles taken up precipitiously. Last month, Rohnert Park toy shop Fundemonium (which delivers curbside pick-up and delivery) reported its jigsaw sales had tripled, compared to the exact same period in 2019.
A number of decades back, one of my very best friends and I attempted to do a 1,000-piece jigsaw together. I bought a puzzle edition of Henri Matisse's Femme au Chapeau in the SFMOMA store along with both of us began working on it during Nicole's regular visits to my apartment. It was my first adult endeavor at a jigsaw.
That DIY spirit followed an earlier jigsaw craze kickstarted by a Massachusetts girl (her name dropped to history) who began cutting on small-piece puzzles in 1907 from magazine covers. (Earlier this, jigsaws were made of big pieces and seen as almost exclusively for children since their invention at 18th-century Europe.) The Massachusetts puzzle manufacturer originally offered them to gain a children's hospital, but the trend proved so popular, it spread all the way to England by 1909. The popularity of puzzles got another boost during World War II, due to a lack of available forms of amusement.
The Femme languished, half-finished, concealed beneath a table cloth in my table for the greater portion of a year, until Nicole eventually gave up on me. When she arrived one day with a roll-up puzzle mat and whisked it away to finally complete the thing, I couldn't have been happier to see that the conclusion of the undertaking.
This weekend, plans are set up to recover my old nemesis, the Femme au Chapeau, from Nicole's home. When it left, I swore I never wanted to see it again. And it has enabled me to detect patience I did not know I'd.
What became evident pretty quickly was that Nicole--a serene and tender individual --had the proper mood for finishing the Femme, while I--infuriatingly impatient--certainly didn't. If Nicole came over, I did not wish to sit and perform a puzzle, I wished to attend a pub, or a restaurant, or even a film. After investing about half an hour at the jigsaw, and recognizing it was likely to take at least once again, I unceremoniously stop.
The following day, when we moved to get a pizza out of Pi Bar at the Missionwe discovered the proprietor performing a giant puzzle over the long table at the window. When I awakened her advancement, she explained,"A client just came here and said that separating up the pieces according to color was cheating!"
Their appeal lies not just in providing a cheap, time-consuming source of entertainment, but in the sense of order they bring upon completion. As puzzle historian Anne Williams told CNBC last month,"It's something you can control [and] it's also a challenge over which you can prevail."
So why the return to jigsaws in 2020? Why, during shelter in place, are so many of us behaving like all of our electronic equipment are broken?
"My awareness of time, together with my ability to consider anything but the job at hand, is entirely missing," she clarified. "I'm living in the moment, and no external or internal factors can distract me."
, many of which were leased out for a night out of little lending libraries. Amateur puzzle manufacturers proliferated to fulfill the requirement and unemployed skilled employees began hand cutting wooden puzzles in their attics and garages.
Though still fantastic alternatives for families sheltering in place together, smaller households, now isolated, simply don't contain enough people to play with these kinds of games at any satisfying way. There are no such limitations with jigsaws.
"No it is not!" I exclaimed, really aghast.
Our obsession is now so full-blown, we braved a San Leandro Walmart last Saturday night in the desperate hunt for a new jigsaw. We discovered that the shelves woefully empty it had been as if we were in the toilet paper aisle. (I finally managed to locate a solitary jigsaw hiding visit our website one of the board games; we snapped it up.)