One Tough Puzzle

Day 87: Being snowed in affords an excellent opportunity to work on jigsaw puzzles, and I do love tough ones! One of my sisters-of-the heart is a professional photographer, and created this 1000-piece puzzler's daydream/nightmare from one of her own images as a gift to me after I remarked on it. There is very little colour in the scene: a marcescent oak (more on that in a minute) and some vaguely green lichen, very little visual variation beyond sky, snow and the brighter trunks. Even so, when laid out on four cookie sheets for analysis, you'd have said that every piece was identical. What I did not notice at the time is that there is a Snowy Owl perched in one of the darker sections between the trunks. It did not provide a starting point, to say the least. The edge went together quickly, and the brown foliage of the oak was relatively easy to sort. However, from that point on, the challenge began. Even when I was down to the last twenty pieces, I was still having trouble fitting them in. For a 1000-piece puzzle to take me more than three days to complete is rare. This one took eight!

Now about that marcescent oak...in Patty's description of the scene, she explained the phenomenon whereby some deciduous trees (particularly oaks) hang onto their leaves instead of dropping them as most others do. She used the word "marcescence" which was new to me, and being able to add a new word to my vocabulary was a gift in and of itself. I thought I'd try it out on Arnie, since he and I swap obscure words from time to time. Neither Arnie nor his wife knew the word, nor did the third botanist visiting them. Obviously, we'll all be doing more reading on the subject.