Maps and jigsaw puzzles. One is an interest; one is an addiction. I have loved one all my life, and have come to love the other over the last few years.
When I was eight or nine, for some reason I was out with my Dad as he was running errands and at one point we pulled into a parking lot and, lo and behold, there was a huge sign saying, ‘Atlas’. OMG, an entire store devoted to maps and atlases! Imagine! Yes, well, imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be a store that sold tires and automotive parts. The sorrows we carry with us from childhood.
Even with SatNav, I have to have a roadmap in the car. Driving down to South Carolina, we didn’t have my handy Rand McNally Road Map, and each time the GPS said to turn in a direction that sounded counter-intuitive, I grew more and more frustrated (which entertained my passenger to no end). Once we arrived I made our host drive me from store to gas station to supermarket all over Hilton Head until I found one. Whew, vacation salvaged.
That’s the love of my life, now on to my addiction. I can go months without doing a jigsaw puzzle. Not even think about it. But the minute one is set up on the dining room table, I can’t leave it alone. It’s like an itch, or a loose tooth; even when you know it is time to stop, you just can’t. There are times when I have woken up with a kink in my lower back from hovering over the table all evening, and I still won’t stop.
I have purposely avoided jigsaws since arriving in Orkney: (a) because my dining table isn’t all that big, and (b) because I’m afraid I’d never leave the house. Well, last month LL & I were in a lovely shop in Fort Augustus, and she pointed out these Mazzles (yes, Elaine, it is entirely LL’s fault – she held the gun to your head until you bought it). A mazzle, it seems, is a map-jigsaw puzzle. They had Loch Lomond, The Munros (that’s all the mountains in Scotland over 3,000 feet – ‘bagging the Munros’ is a thing here), and The Cairngorms. The Cairngorms are the beautiful mountains I drive through every time I go south, so that’s the one I bought.
Oh dear. It is hard. And I can’t stop. The photo is Day One (which was June 22 according to Google Photos) and it’s ten days later and I’m still not done. The grunt of disgust I hear from Scout when she sees me head over to the table is annoying – who is she to judge me?
My goal is to finish by the end of the weekend. And to NOT buy another one until the long winter nights start to close in.