Puzzling

    Winter is the season to do things I don't have time for in the other three seasons. One of those things is putting puzzles together. The doctors tell us that keeping our minds active helps to stave off or at least slow down dementia. Puzzles make me think. I hope it's helping. Let me know if I am deceiving myself.

    Several in my family are puzzle enthusiasts. We pass puzzles around and sometimes forget who's whose. I did three puzzles so far this winter (since October) and started on the fourth (and last) one this month. When I dumped it out on the table it looked hopeless. The puzzle was three-feet long and contained many shades of blue, gray and brown. I almost gave up before I started. But then my stubborn German genes kicked in and I started putting the border together. If the previous puzzler had not put the edge pieces in a separate bag my German genes might not have been thick enough to get me going.

   I started filling in the picture with the giraffes and zebras which were the most obvious colors. I spent hours and hours bent over that thing as it slowly came together. There were other things on my to-do list but they silently waited while I fed my addiction. 

    I finally started getting annoyed with myself for spending so much time on the puzzle and ignoring other things I should have been doing. I thought of Romans 6:16, “Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey.”  I told Leroy, "I am not going to be the slave of a jigsaw puzzle!" After that I limited the amount of time I could work on it each day and got some other things done.

   I finished the puzzle in about an hour this morning, and here it is. My daughter-in-law, who is a wildlife animal artist, said you would never see something like this in Africa. These animals do not share their waterholes.

    

Memories Are A Treasure

 Today we reached a new road marker. It was on this day thirty years ago that Steve suddenly left us without warning. We had just eaten our belated Christmas dinner when he went to sing at a church and wound up singing in heaven instead. At the time, I thought I could not live another day and here we are thirty years later.

I have so many memories of Steve in the eighteen years he was with us. He loved books and at age of four could sit contentedly in the doctor's waiting room without getting into trouble while I had a checkup for the next baby.

Steve had a vivid imagination that created all kinds of fun. His little brother, Gene, followed him around joining in the fun and imitating him. Once day Steve set up this crow's nest in the front yard so they could play pirates. Notice the empty paper towel tube his Raggedy Andy had for a spy glass.

We had a cabin in the mountains where we went several times each year. One time, when Steve was about twelve years old, we had a long full summer day and got to the cabin well after dark. He was so tired he thought he could die. He flopped on the couch right inside the door and said, "Mom, will my skeleton be in your way here?"

My mother passed away at the end of July 1993. We had estate sale in October. Steve was about a month short of his eighteenth birthday. She had an old pool table she always used as a buffet table for Christmas dinners. Steve told me he bought it and I asked him why. He said, "Because that's where the food always was." He started trying to fix it up but never got it finished. That pool table sat in our basement for twenty-eight years and was always used for our Christmas dinners.

About six weeks after he turned eighteen, Steve put on the new clothes he had bought to wear for chorus programs and left for the first program of that year's schedule. Halfway to the church, the car he was riding in spun around and the passenger side hit a sycamore tree. Someone came to tell us the news that he was gone in an instant. When Gerald (age 9) heard it he flopped down on a chair and said, "but we still wanted him." Exactly!

In the long road through grief I learned the truth of Song of Solomon 8:7. "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it." Floods of tears and death itself cannot destroy love. Though the one we love is no longer here to return our love, still our love lives on. We cherish the memories of what once was and wonder what might have been.

Your memory is a treasure

With which we'll never part;

God has you in His keeping,

We have you in our hearts.