Metamorphosis

No one else has this puzzle: it is unique. I had it done maybe twenty years ago from a photo of mine, taken in a bluebell wood beloved of DWJ. That was a magical hour.

But when the puzzle came from Wentworth, I was disappointed. The pieces all looked far too pale and blurry, and the scant handful of whimsies were ludicrously feeble—a cricket bat, I ask you! A toy car!  Discouraged, I put it away. I didn’t want a pale shadow of a numinous memory, so I kept not doing it. And even in this last year of intense puzzling, I would rattle the red box and set it aside.

But just now I had a few days, waiting for the next parcels from the puzzle club, so I thought I’d fit it in. And like an unregarded chrysalis, it hatched. It's a morpho.

Yes, the whimsies are still cartoonishly puny—anyone for tennis? Yes, the pieces don’t interlock, and atomize at the merest brush of a sleeve. But the pallor in the individual pieces is a scattering effect, like taking just one teaspoonful of colored water from a jar. As the image grew, it saturated. I could swear there was depth in the landscape. The photo's still blown up a little more than is optimum, but viewed at a proper distance, it’s pleasantly impressionstic. And the cut is quite good—fiendish even—with those interlocking circles and a great many false edges.






As I worked and it grew on me, I started worrying that I’d lost pieces—you know, that thing where the sort of teakettle piece that goes right there eludes all searches, and turns out to be two quite other shapes. I didn’t want want it to be marred in the restoration.

In the end, it was all there, and it took me back to the morning of the world.







I love the way the leafing branches float like clouds, above the air-sea of the flowers.

Nine