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"Landscape Puzzle"

My life was like a giant landscape puzzle, the one with a thousand pieces.  I'd spent my childhood finding all the straight edge pieces and putting them together to form the shell of the puzzle.  My teens filled in the varying degrees of blue sky portions, with the occasional gray thunderstorms of teenage angst.  My college days were the golden hues of prairie wheat blowing freely; their upright stocks standing tall, fiercely proud of their independence.  Now in my early thirty's I was searching for the foundation pieces for the stone century home that would stand as the focal point of the puzzle.  I thought I had laid the groundwork pieces with Luke, but when I looked closely at the shapes of the pieces I was putting together, I realized that the fit just wasn't right. 

            When two perfect pieces are joined, they snap together, their bonds secure.  You can try to pound and hammer those two pieces down, but if the shapes don't match, there's no connection.  Sometimes you even try and gloss over the mistake, by adding other matching pieces to the two you tried to hammer down, but eventually that too comes back to haunt you.  At the end of your life, all the pieces have to connect.  They all have to match.  Hopefully the frame you started building from birth is full, each piece dependent on the other.  One cohesive unit that can stand on its own.  Perhaps one day the landscape puzzle will hang on your granddaughters’ wall; a testament to the truth that yes, it is possible to have a life where all the pieces fit.  I didn't want my puzzle to end up as a broken mess on someone's floor.  I would wait until I found that matching piece, even if it took a lifetime.

            That's the good thing about puzzles.  You can never finish a really big one in a single day, no matter how hard you try.  You leave it set up on a table in the back of a room somewhere and every time you walk by, you try to fit a few more pieces in.  If none fit that day, you try again tomorrow and you keep trying until you get it right.  Only a sore loser gets frustrated and puts the puzzle back in the box.  I wasn't a sore loser.  Maybe instead of focusing so much on the foundation of my house, I'd go back and work on the wheat section.  Eventually, the wheat had to lead back to the house.  By then, I'd be ready for it.