We avoid buying ones in the older Classic cut. We have one: sunflowers, a butterfly, what was not to love, right?
It quickly came to be a joke about how strong is our marriage. Wooden pieces don’t exactly snap together anyway but this one acts like north/south magnets repelling each other. It’s easier to just choose a different one.
I picked up a small stack tonight and as the bottom slid out of the lowest I realized what I had done. The broken Corelle of puzzles, everything everywhere, and it was the sunflower one.
So then we had to do it to make sure I’d found it all.
It’s missing this connector, he says. I go looking and to my surprise there it was over there, he was right.
Some frustration later, okay, I go looking again. The emergency Go bag by the door–all its crevices. The wheels of the long-unused wheelchair. Afghans, shaken out. The immovable cushion on the futon chair coughed up two pieces of Lincoln Logs that had missed their given-away date by twenty years.
Four pieces.
That didn’t do it.
One last piece. A corner piece. (And I’m thinking, so that means we don’t ever have to do this one again, if we’re lucky.)
We could say a prayer, he said helpfully.
I laughed and asked him: Could you think of a less important thing to ask G_d to help with? But maybe He would enjoy the joke, so I did, telling Him, This is not important and it doesn’t matter if we don’t but if You want us to find this silly thing we would love it. If You want; it doesn’t matter.
Then we both laughed.
I put a note in the box with the problem and date and now we can actually avoid the darn thing in good conscience because maybe we’ll actually find it and this was just another sneaky way to get me to spruce up that part of the house better, which it is now.
The problem is, until we do find it, how does one vacuum that room?