So Mercedes and I got in a big fight last night. The stresses of island life; moving away from our friends and family, learning to communicate together, making new friends, heat, bugs, lack of services on island, our transportation situation and not having AC in our house is making life difficult and fights more inevitable.
So M decided to leave, to cool off and I decided to do soothing constructive. I don't like to puzzle when I am mad, because puzzling to me is something I do when I am happy and something M and I do together. Well, I made in exception last night. We have a puzzle that was crushed in a box during the move and it lost a few pieces. We decided to put it together and cut out a W for our last name in the completed puzzle (Hopefully hiding the missing piece) and put it on our front door.
So I started on the 750 piece puzzle by Julian Askins titled Lake Side View. I started as usual, sorting the edges and flipping pieces. Shortly after starting on the edges, a piece stuck to my arm and fell in a flowerpot under the table. I just barely caught the flash of white out of the corner of my eye, it might have otherwise gone unnoticed and unlooked for as the puzzle we know is missing pieces.
The pot contains a dead stalk of a plant that we inherited when we moved in and is pining for the seeds we recently bought. I retrieved the piece, and I thought, "huh, thats a funny place for a piece to land". I also noticed there was a bit of a whole where a piece could fall in and end up under the dead plant. I picked up the plant just on the hope that our missing piece from the James Rizzi 5000 piece puzzle we just finished might be in there (I mean it seemed reasonable that if a piece from this puzzle could fall in there, why not from Rizzi?) and to my disbelief the piece sat starring back at me, freed from its dank tomb.
I never really wanted to do this puzzle. The thought of spending hours on a puzzle only knowing you will be disappointed does not rank high on my list of things to do, but I needed to cool down and do something constructive and the end result of this was that we found our missing piece which started the healing process of our fight. I guess without the fight, we may have never found the piece, and the piece helped end our fight.
Its seems appropriate that a puzzle brought us back together.
 |
| The missing piece |
Hey Thomas...so sorry to hear about you and M fighting. I hope all is back to normal now after MIRACOUSLY discovering the missing Rizzi piece. What an amazing feat that was!
ReplyDeleteSo, if life is so hard on the island, why did you guys decide to move there in the first place? Do you guys have "mover's remorse"?
There is one good thing about having a big fight with your spouse....make sex is always the best! LOL
Penny
Hey Penny, we have indeed been having a lot of make up sex!!! Island life we have learned is a bit harder than we imagined. You take for granted the small things like a good grocery store where you can find almost everything for a good price. Here, you can pay 9 dollars for a standard box of cereal and they wont have guacamole mix.... so you end up going grocery shopping all day all over the island (One place for this and one place for that). We are a minority here (I have a new respect for minorities in a community), and it adds a bit of a barrier to making friends. We miss all of our friendships that we have built over the years and family. We are making new ones, but the process is slow. The bugs really like M here (they dont bother me nearly as much) and that is hard as well. But, the positive side is, well, its an amazing place. It is so beautiful and the weather is perfect. People are nice and rum is cheap. Another challenge is we only have a scooter here, which limits are ability to be apart. We are adapting, but its hard but well worth it! We are currently looking for a new place with AC. That will help a lot!
DeleteP.S. I got an early bday present today.... you guessed it, LIFE! Found it on ebay for 200 with shipping! Yeah!!!