Hello my good readers,

I can’t tell how much it means to me that I have people that look for and read my weekly blogs. I love writing. I love the release it gives me and the way it helps me to express myself so much better than I can speaking. And believe me, I am quite the speaker. Not as much as my spouse, mind you, who has never met a stranger. I just feel like I work best if I can write and figure things out for myself.

Puzzles give me a lot of inner peace. I get to make order out of chaos, I can focus all of my attention on something, and it allows my mind to travel without putting conscience effort into the exercise. There was a time when my grandmother had to stay with my mother for a few months due to an issue with her house. Granny and I would visit and do puzzles one night a week when I would visit and make her dinner. When my brother and his family and my mother get together with me and my wife, we love to do puzzles together. As my wife works away from home most of the time, puzzles used to fill my evenings with a stress reliever in her absence. I have lost 2 people I used to love to do puzzles with just over a year ago, so I have been afraid to go back. I was afraid that a puzzle wouldn’t be a strong enough of a distractent from my grief. I was afraid it would remind me too much of the two people I miss more than anyone in this world and I will never see again. However, this weekend, something changed. My wife and I usually play cards, Rummy to be exact. However, we both felt an urge to puzzle. So we have completed two in the last two days and I am currently sorting our next puzzle. How do you sort? Edges, then I go according to pattern. This pattern is of World War II posters and I have separated the pieces into ones with words and pieces without words. Thrilling, I know. But sometimes inner peace and happiness comes from just picking up broken pieces and putting them back together in a more pleasing style.