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.