Community spread
The handles of a bright green Sobey’s bag loop around a door knob. Moments later, inside the house, a text bubble appears on a phone. “Dropped it off. Enjoy.” A couple of days later, another ping to a different phone. “Hitchcock mystery. 1,000 pieces. Difficult. Interested?”
Jigsaw puzzles are something I deliberately avoided during the lockdown last spring. Not because puzzles seemed hopelessly dull (they did) but because I had a feeling we were trapped in a long game and some pastimes would need to be saved for later.
Towards the end of summer, after life had settled into a pandemic normal that allowed us to see friends again - albeit in small groups, often outside, with precautionary hand sanitizer and a polite Regency-era distance - I started a note on my phone. Covid Winter: a to-do list that included a couple of TV shows, cooking projects, and, yup, puzzles.
For months the list remained theoretical. September turned to October became November, then December. There was a long stretch where the case count was zero. Even when cases appeared they were travel-related and the two-week arrival quarantine meant they were immediately contained.
On New Year’s we went out to dinner with some friends then back to someone’s place for board games and laughs. We sat around a table, elbows nearly, though not quite, brushing, slapping down cards and collecting tricks, tallying up points. Everyone was eagerly discussing the vaccine which our friend the ER doc had already received. January rolled in snowy but quiet and it felt like we might avoid a second lock down, sail into the vaccine queue and straight on through to the “after” times.
Needless to say.
Puzzling
Have you ever done a mystery puzzle? It’s like this: you get a whodunit scenario. The puzzle, when completed, reveals the crime scene, full of clues you must decode in order to solve the murder. The catch is there’s no picture to guide you. The image is revealed only through assembly.
Of course this is an analogy for novel writing. It’s equally tedious and frustrating and even when you know you have all the pieces, that somehow they do all fit together to form a coherent whole, there are moments of doubt.
Turns out puzzles are fun. At least in lockdown when cracking into a new puzzle on a Friday night with a bottle of wine constitutes a big weekend “plan.”
First time around, when we hunkered down last spring, everyone was baking. Cinnamon buns, root beer cupcakes, and lemon curd doughnuts materialized on door steps, their bakers waving through the windows as they went by. This time around, there’s a brisk trade in puzzles. I think about those cardboard boxes being shared between households, crossing thresholds we can no longer enter, all the ways we hold fast to a sense of community.
On Saturday we venture out to a lake we’ve never visited to tramp around a warren of winding snowy trails. A perk of lockdown: discovering gems that have been here all along. In the car on the way home, a text from my friend Joel arrives: a photo of a leaf in a jar of water. I’d admired his ZZ plant and he’s propagating a cutting for me. One day, a plant will appear on my door step and Joel will stand on the street waving through the window.
Even as every square on the calendar remains blank, even as lock-down is extended and we’re not sure what the new normal will be when we re-open, as long as anticipation remains, so too will joy.
