I stand at the top of the stairs and flip on the light. I’ve been sent to fetch a fresh puzzle for us to solve. Puzzles are serious business around our house. Our favorite cool-weather pastime, there is always one on the dining room table to work on from November to March. Mom, Daddy, and I work together as a team—which is rare. We spend most of our days in silos, reporting in only at the dinner table. Daddy goes to work, I go to school, and I have no idea what Mom does. Sometimes she sleeps all day. Other times, she is in one of her tirades and there is no peace. With her, I live mostly on eggshells. I try to keep everything still. Quiet. 

But when we play games or work on projects together, it’s nice. I know my role is to be the good kid, the apple of daddy’s eye. Everything’s easier when he’s home. 

I’m different from them—we fit, but we don’t. I’m way more physically active than they are. If sloths could be humans, that’s what my parents would be. Tiny. Little. Sloths. By age 13, I’m already towering over both of them, and I’m only 5’6”.

We dump the pieces out and lay them flat, flipping them over to see what we’re up against. It’s a full 500 pieces, about the largest our table can handle. We sort the edge pieces out, and of course have the box displayed as our guide. We find the four corners and make our best guess as to the layout. 

I stand up for an overview of the puzzle pieces. The pieces look odd compared to the picture, but they often do at this phase. So, I sit down and start assembling an edge. Mom and Dad each take a side. Without too much effort, we piece the outer frame together. 

I look at the box. It’s a gorgeous scene of the sunrise over Mirror Lake, with Mt. Rainier in the background and a huge field of yellow wildflowers in the front.

But none of these edges on the border in front of me have any yellow. I stand again and look at the box. It’s a new one that Daddy and I just bought last week from the Bi-Mart. What’s wrong with this picture?

It’s completely off! Looking at the pieces, I don’t see anything like wildflowers, and certainly not yellow. In fact, there’s little to no yellow at all. We’re also missing anything like the majestic blue and purple hues of the mountain we know and hold dear.

What lies before me looks like it’s descending into chaos. I see things that look like people, a huge crowd of them and other things I can’t make out. It’s the wrong picture! Someone sold us a faulty puzzle. The nerve!

Daddy has now risen next to me, takes in what I’m showing him, and agrees. “Well, let’s just work on it anyway. We’ll be blind but that will be sorta fun, right?”

Mother sits down anxiously. She doesn’t like surprises. I hope she doesn’t go into one of her “migraines” and wander off. I want her to hang in for the ride. Solving this 500-piece mystery will take some effort, and we need her. But down she goes. Mom goes to bed and Daddy and I work on the puzzle a while longer.

There’s still some blue sky here, so we’ve got something to work with, and clouds, which help you see how the pieces connect better. We’ll have to work slowly on this, taking in everything at face value. We can’t make any assumptions about how these pieces fit together, nor how the whole thing will look when it’s done.

In a few weeks we see the finished picture of a mostly cloudy day in Paris with shops and a river and a huge church. People are everywhere, bustling with energy. 

Without a map, it took the three of us a lot of work. There was much struggle along the way but also moments of triumph when the pieces fit, and a new scene came into view, even if it was unfamiliar.

I wonder if some other family has the alternative puzzle and is wondering what mountain that is? Are they maybe in France looking at what to them would be a relatively unknown western American mountain instead of the River Seine?

In the end, we did our best. It’s not the picture we thought it would be, that’s for sure, but I guess it’s ours now.