To Dream the Impossumable Dream

 

            To Dream the Impossumable Dream 

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To jump start a new year and top off my week, we had a puzzling close encounter of the impossumable kind. Lola The Dog chased down an adult opossum. It might have dropped out of the avocado tree. Lola was beside herself with dog joy.

Lola has a good measure of hunter in her parentage. She’s brought me birds and lizards of various shades. But this is a biggie.

She proudly deposited her gift at my feet, tail wagging like ‘copter blades. Good dog. There it lay, dead. I’d never seen an adult ‘possum up close. The strong jaws! The teeth! “Shark” came to mind.

I gingerly picked it up the hairy package with the naked tail and plunked it in the tall blue garbage can and banged down the lid, just in case. 

Later, I heard scrabbling sounds from over that way. Lifted the lid. The dead ‘possum had moved. The beast had been playing possum.

What was I to do? One of the men would surely be by later to help so I turned my attention elsewhere.

I like working jigsaw puzzles. Back in early autumn I ordered four new jigsaw puzzles from the Ordering Place, you know, the one we all use, name starts with “A”. I worked a puzzle Christmas week. Decided New Year’s week to tackle another. Puzzling is not an Olympic Sport to me. I come and go at it in small doses.

However the second puzzle I selected, a rainy day scene in a Parisian flower market, is gray. It’s all gray. Shades and variations of gray. Gray. Rain. Fog. Stone buildings. Eiffel Tower a shadow in the distance. Gray. With soggy flowers huddled in one corner.

Reluctantly, I have to give up my bragging rights about my amazing ability to work puzzles according to gradations of color. I’m good. I like to start with the sky because it is easiest. The corner with the cluster of flowers in pots? Not so easy. But fun. Generally.

When I’m laying out the thousand bits of cardboard, if two are still attached to one another, I separate them. (I don’t cheat at solitaire either.) I want to drag out the fun, milk every drop of satisfaction from arranging tiny chunks of cardboard into a painting.

So I figure maybe a gray puzzle is a good thing, despite the hit to my pride. I mean, that’s what I figured until I spent a day putting together a mere sixteen pieces. If I ever finish, I may take oil paints and give the hazy foggy gray sky some color. That’s where I started, the sky.

And the pieces seem to have only about six shapes. All of them. That means that pieces that seem to fit beautifully, and they do, they fit, are not meant to be locked together.

After tearing hanks of my own hair out in frustration, I went outside and picked tomatoes.

That’s another puzzlement. My bucket garden, the one I figured I put to rest until spring, meaning February. I’ve accepted that I’ll have perpetual tomatoes. I’m not complaining. But I admit I am puzzled.

And puzzled not just by tomatoes. I ate a lot of green beans last summer. They are easy growers. I cleverly moved the buckets next to my clothesline posts so I no longer had to tie the creepers to bamboo sticks. After a while, tired of green beans, I let the beans go brown and harvested dry beans for seed. One day a whole new bean shoot climbed up the pole and suddenly I’m eating green beans again, simply because they are there. Well, what would you do?

And what is this nonsense with the zucchini? In October, in hopes of one more crop, especially since invasive bugs took out my last crop, I planted four seeds. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. Suddenly, after two months of lying dormant, poor timing if you ask me, four zucchini plants shot up. Will they? Won’t they? It’s a puzzle. 

Yes, the puzzle. I mathematically deduced that I may finish that hazy and most irritating jigsaw puzzle February 23 at my present number of pieces per day. February, in time to replant my buckets, except for the tomatoes and green beans, which are perpetual.

I may give the rainy-scene puzzle to Lola The Dog to chew on.

My puzzling garden has convinced me that life wants to live.

Ah, yes, life. Fortunately, Leo showed up, took my not-so-dead ‘possum out to a distant corn field and watched it scramble away through the weeds.

Like I said, life wants to live, even when it seems impossumable.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

January 6, 2022

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The Right Way

And it is my way, all of the ways.
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The Right Way


When I was growing up I learned that it was important that I always get it “Right”, do things the “ Right Way ”. The “ Right Way ” was never spelled out for me. So I had to watch like a hawk and hope to figure “It” out. But, if I did not catch on in time, I caught a different “It”. This “It” meant a willow switch to the back of my legs or humiliation or harsh words.

“Antoinette insisted we put together a five-hundred piece jigsaw puzzle,” my daughter announced with laughter.

“Five-hundred pieces! But Annie is only four. She won’t have the patience for that. Last month we bought her half-a-dozen twenty-five piece puzzles.”

“She whips through those, Mom. Maybe the big one will be too tough for her, but she insisted. She and I turned all the pieces right side up. Then she kept trying to start in the middle. So I had to teach her how to find the edge pieces and start with them.”

I cringed. “Oh, Dee , I taught you to do that, didn’t I? I taught you that’s the right way to work a puzzle. I was wrong. There is no “right” way. Maybe Annie’s way is just as right as ours and she should be allowed to figure out what works best for her. Her way might suit her better. Or it might be how she learns patterns. So you go back and un-teach her right now.”

“Whoa, Mom. You feel strongly about this, don’t you?”

“You bet I do. The “ Right Way ” is a trap. Brings your thinking to a dead stop. Fortunately, along the way I had good friends who took me under wing and showed me that it’s a lot of fun to explore different roads to the same destination. What’s more, the road that is best for me today, may not be the best road for you. And tomorrow’s road may be different yet.

“In fact, watching how you and your brother learned things also taught me a lot. Both of you were still babies when I realized you were ambidextrous. I could have forced you to be right-handed. Remember Sister Mary Bernadette? She didn’t allow left-handers. You still have chicken-scratch handwriting. And we three each have a different way we organize things. I’ll never forget the day I learned to avert my eyes and simply close the door to Ben’s room, knowing he is ‘differently organized’.”

When I realize that I cannot see over the top of the rut I’m in, I try to climb out. Here’s a test. Which foot do you start with when you are putting on your britches? Uh, huh. See. Same foot every time. Try alternating left and right each day. It is just a little brain shift trick. It affects our left-brain/right-brain creativity. And it’s kind of fun.

Annie’s puzzle stuck in my mind. I like jigsaw puzzles. I decided to perform a puzzle test. I dug my thousand-piece puzzles out of the cupboard and laid them out in a row. I chose a winter scene, snow piled high, just like the drifts outside my windows. I dumped the puzzle in the middle of my largest table. I turned the thousand pieces picture-side-up. I cleared a space in the center. I bravely forsook the siren call of the edges. I picked an obvious middle-section piece with which to begin my grand experiment. In a short while I had cobbled together a section roughly twelve by eight inches.

I learned that a puzzle can be worked from the inside to the outside. I chortled with glee when I finally got to press an edge piece into place. I finished the puzzle and proclaimed the experiment a success.

So today I have two ways to put together a jigsaw puzzle. I wonder what would happen if I started on the left side and worked toward the right. Or from top to bottom. Or corner to corner.

Next I’ll tackle crossword puzzles. Vertical clues first.

Sondra Ashton
Havre Daily News: Looking Out My Back Door
January 28, 2010
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