Marash Girl has the fondest memories of jig saw puzzles -- they bring to mind a big old Victorian summer house built of unpainted weathered wood, a summer house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Cape Cod -- few windows made for dark, cool rooms and in the midst of the central room was a "bridge" table covered with a jig saw puzzle waiting to be completed -- a puzzle to be worked on by the summer dwellers when the weather turned cold, the day dark, the clouds heavy with rain . . . Time stretching out with no end . . . Time to dream, time to think, time to walk the beach, time to chat, time to . . . work on a jig saw puzzle! There was no television in the house, no radio, no telephone, certainly no computer, nor cell phone. And one could take such pleasure in the small accomplishment of finding one tiny piece that fit -- the smallest of accomplishments, no witnesses, no praise . . . just the puzzle and you.
And so it was that when Marash Girl found herself in Stowe, Vermont, at the beginning of a week that promised rain every day, she (as you may have learned from reading her earlier blog posts this month) decided to begin a jig saw puzzle. Stopping at the gift shop (before, of course, she had tried the local yard sales where she found two jigsaw puzzles "with no pieces missing" -- Hah!), the salesperson commented, "We have one that's 35 pieces . . . How large to do you want it?" Marash Girl answered, "About 500 pieces?"
"500 pieces? 500 pieces?" scoffed a customer from the far corner of the shop; "I'm working on one that's 1500 pieces!"
Marash Girl started counting . . . hmmm. 1500 pieces, at 1 piece a day . . . that would take about 4 years and 3 months to complete; 2 pieces a day, 2 years and 1.5 months to complete; 3 pieces a day, 1 year and 20 days; 4 pieces a day, 1 year and 15 days; 5 pieces a day, 300 days to complete; 6 pieces a day, 250 days to complete; 7 pieces a day 214 1/3 days; 8 pieces a day would take 187 days plus 1/2 a day. 9 pieces a day, 166 days plus 2/3 of a day. 10 pieces a day, 150 days . . . Would that the man had helpers, or a lot of time! He must have thought that in Stowe, it rains forever!
In the modern world, the demarcation between childhood and adulthood, is when space ends and time begins. As children where are driven by where we are, where we are going, where we were. As adults, it is the time it takes to get there, the time we spend there, the time we left there, the time that it is. Time is the mute tyrant of our lives. It is the arc of the sun, as children that is the geometry of our every day. We arise with the sun and we retire with the sun. It is in the space of that arc, that silent swath of light, that earmarks our day. We make the slow transition to adulthood on the first day of school. For those few, and some many, wh can curl up in the inexpressible languor of summer, as in a max field Parrish painting, our true childhood reasserting itself, until that fateful summer, the interregnum of our being all grown up, is declared to be a time to get ahead and go to summer school, or music camp, or some such pursuit of getting ahead of the clock. As Solomon said, there is a time for everything, time to be a child, even when one is all grown up. Now, where does that puzzle piece go?
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