Why am I always missing a piece of the puzzle?

I have a love/hate relationship with jigsaw puzzles. I love the challenge of trying to put all the pieces together, but I also get bored with the challenge as well. Typically, I associate jigsaw puzzles with the cold Minnesota winter. Those were the times that I would go to my grandparents and help put puzzles together. Outside of putting puzzles together with family I really haven’t put a jigsaw puzzle together in years. In my mind it will take too much time. But, over the past 2-months of COVID-19 lock-down I decided that I needed to do something productive besides watching the depressing news.

I found the perfect puzzle to put together. It was a puzzle that I found for my Grandma this past winter. Now, you have to understand that we are a John Deere family. (For those of you not from farm country, John Deere is a brand of machinery) You are either a red family or a green family, and we have bled John Deere green for decades. So, when I saw this John Deere puzzle at the store I immediately thought it would be perfect to put together with my Grandma. The puzzle shows a beautiful scene of days gone by where men are building a barn and the kids are having a picnic on a summer day. It reminded me of stories my dad had told me and I thought that my grandma would enjoy it.

Well, I showed Grandma what I had bought this past winter and she immediately groaned and said something to the effect of, “oh that puzzle looks too difficult. Look at all the shades of green! You can put it together.”

Alright, fine. I’ll put the puzzle together by myself. It can’t be that hard, right? 1,000 piece puzzle with a fun, nostalgic picture will be fun and shouldn’t take too long.

Guess what? Grandma was right. Grandma is always right.

I started this blasted puzzle the weekend of March 14^th and as of mid-May I’m not even halfway done yet. There are so many shades of green! The pieces are so tiny that I haven’t even gotten the border completely done yet.

Now typically I would just throw the puzzle back in the box and never look back. Who cares. It was too difficult and I didn’t have time.

Well, unfortunately I am very good at starting something and quitting halfway through in various aspects of my life. I get excited for something, give it a try and then get bored with it once it gets hard or takes too long. I’m really good at starting projects, but the follow through isn’t too great. Unless I have a firm deadline on something the project won’t get done. I need the stress and the adrenaline of working up against a deadline. I love that rush!

So, this puzzle doesn’t have a deadline and does it really matter if I finish it or not? When I started it in mid-March the goal was to have it done by the time the pandemic was done. I ignorantly thought that would be this spring, but obviously that isn’t the case.

Why don’t I just pack up the puzzle and call it a day? I have decided that this puzzle represents a lot in my life right now and I’m not calling quits. The easy way out is to be done and move on to the next thing. It’s finally nice outside and I have far too many things to accomplish out there. But, I am bound and determined that I will complete this puzzle. I don’t care how long it takes.