My mother used to have these huge jigsaw puzzles spread out on our dining room tabletop and she would spend countless hours putting them together. Then, once she successfully finished with her puzzle, she’d toss all of the pieces back into the box and put the box on shelves that were already crammed full of other completed puzzle boxes in a closet in the basement of our house. I don’t think she ever did any one puzzle twice.

My wife is into crossword puzzles. There are two of them each day in our daily newspaper and she spends a good portion of each morning working on them. And she does them with a pen!

I never had patience for jigsaw puzzles and I’d rather spend my mornings on WordPress than working on crossword puzzles. But I do enjoy reading mystery novels and watching detective shows on TV. I always try to figure out the puzzle of the crime or to solve the mystery before the protagonist of the book or the main character in the show can. I’m thrilled when I can do that, but then I think that maybe the solutions to these puzzles were too easy and would have been obvious to anyone paying attention, which makes me feel disappointed.

Yeah, I know. That’s kind of puzzling.

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Written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, where she gives us the word “puzzle.”