Home

Home, home, home. How I love home.

It's been a lovely visit home.

This holiday, we have put together two jigsaw puzzles. We busted out the first one the night after I arrived. It was a 1000-piece conglomeration of Hershey's products. We started at 9:00 Saturday night with the intention of having it available to work on it piecemeal-like for then next few days. We finished it five hours later at 2 a.m.

That out of our system, we meandered our way through the second puzzle for the next week and a half and got to reap the benefits of puzzle-putting-together.

The conversation meandered from one unrelated topic to another as we sat there trying to put together the figures.

We celebrated with each other when someone finally found the piece with the fox's eye.

As my sister rifled through the remaining pieces in the box, she kept saying with unvaried enthusiasm, "Ooh, now this looks like something." And I would remind her, "mmhmm, I bet it is something."

We did the puzzle at the kitchen table which was perfectly suited for stopping for a break to peel an orange or grab a handful of nuts to munch on ("Hey, can I have one?").

The best part of puzzle-putting together is just the being together doing it. Hunting for a piece with a white tip while your sister/mom/brother/dad nearby hunts for their piece. I like being there at the old, worn-out kitchen table talking, or not talking. We don't have to talk to say, "Hey, I like this. This being here with you." We just know.

A follow-up

So, I finished it. Gone With the Wind. What a great read! After the initial shock of the juxtaposition between integration and the antithesis of integration (plantations, slavery, and racial slurs, oh my), the story was delightful. And I think what I enjoyed about it more than anything else is that I had the opportunity to enjoy an iconic story with no idea how it ended. Sure, Gone With the Wind was immortalized by Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in the 30's, and sure there are countless pop culture references to this epic novel (now I can understand and appreciate the hilarity behind Carol Burnett's use of curtains for elegant eveningwear), but somehow, against all odds, I maintained innocence in regard to Scarlett O'hara's outcome.

I was reminded how fantastically fun it is to read a well-written, well-known, well-crafted story and enjoy the unraveling and discovery of the characters a page at a time.

I feel so sad for the generation of kiddos that will never experience the magic of reading Harry Potter...discovering the loyalties of the characters from one book to another. Movies hand it to you...in an hour and a half to two hours.

Books slow me down. They remind me that taking time to discover is okay. It took me two months and a smidgeon to finish Gone With the Wind (I'm in school, you know...). I had to waylay the discovery of the end for two months (and a smidgeon).

It was way worth it. :-)