Jigsaw Puzzles..

When I was young, my mother had a fascination with jigsaw puzzles.

She used to have 500 or 1000 or 2000 piece puzzles and she always chose the most challenging designs. Like having everything in the same colour tone, or having reflections or symmetrical objects.

When finished, we would then apply glue onto the pictures and bring them to Clementi framer shop to be framed.

The entire process of making the jigsaw and framing it would take a few months to complete and cost more than 100 bucks.

She would usually have to drag me to the specially-set-up table and make me crack my head over where to put in a few pieces before I managed to escape. Yet she would still be patiently sitting there, puzzling over the fitting for hours. And she always left the last piece for me to fit in because it gave the sense of accomplishment of finally finishing the process.

I could never understand her fascination with these puzzles.

And gradually my mum gave up doing the jigsaws too, as moving to a series of ever-smaller houses and living on an ever-tighter budget meant we have no time or space to do such things.

It is something I only recently grasped, when I stumbled across jigsaw puzzle websites like jigzone.com and spend a lot of time figuring out the jigsaws when I was free during the holidays. Then I suddenly realised how much doing her jigsaws helped her to think and analyze. It helped her to appreciate patterns, colours and the subtleness of a fit.

Because that was the effect on me too.

Shall go introduce my mother to the online jigsaws.

They may be ephemeral, but at least she will be able to enjoy puzzling out the jigasws again.