Hourglass by Amalia Gladhart
When Sadie was sick, I used to do puzzles with her. Not with her, exactly. She was too tired to sit up or concentrate much, and the chemo gave her brain fog. But I’d do a puzzle on a card table beside the recliner that was her combination command center/daybed/throne and now and then she’d check my progress. When she was feeling well enough, she’d place a piece or two. If other visitors stopped by, they might add a piece, too.
It was a way for me to sit with her without sitting on top of her, without staring urgently into her tired face and forcing her to try to make conversation, even when I didn’t mean to. The puzzle gave me a reason to linger without having to say it too baldly, too awkwardly—we don’t know how much time you’ll have, I’d like to be with you while I can. Even more awkwardly: the sickroom is boring. I need something to do.
Better than reading a book, because when she’d have the TV on, I could never focus. And maybe she’d comment on something that caught her eye or made her think. Other times, she wanted to talk. Slowly. Pauses. Taking time to collect her thoughts. It wasn’t all ponderous, not at all. But she was gathering memories, ordering them, considering what she wanted to say. And, yes, sometimes her mind would wander.
With a puzzle, I could keep at what I was doing and listen as needed. Respond, hold up my end of the conversation. And she could talk in fits and starts, three or four sentences or words and then a minute or six of quiet, and I wasn’t always losing my place, having to take up the thread again, find my page, only to be interrupted a moment later.
I suppose that’s why people knit. There’s stitch counting, I know, but that will depend on the pattern and, I imagine, on how good a knitter you are. There’s crocheting, which I’ve heard is easier to learn. Either would address the problem of what to do with hands and eyes, how to occupy one’s attention yet remain available to attend to someone else. Measure the time without rushing it along.
Only, I should have had the presence of mind to undo a few pieces, muddle an edge before I took a break. I didn’t hurry, ever; I dragged out our time. But maybe I could have dragged it out further if I hadn’t been so determined to finish that sunrise mackerel sky. If I hadn’t placed that last piece.
Author's Note:
Nothing better than a long walk on the beach, rain or shine. Life feels possible, I feel possible. Or a forest hike, a swim in a mountain lake—that tentative, bit-by-bit immersion and then the delicious clear green-blue water under the sky. But home is good, too: sitting under the dappled maple shade on our treehouse-like deck, or reading with all three cats on my lap. And jigsaw puzzles.
Amalia Gladhart’s fiction has appeared in “The Common,” “Leon Literary Review,” “New World Writing Quarterly,” “Necessary Fiction,” and other journals. Translations include “Trafalgar” and “Jaguars’ Tomb” (Angélica Gorodischer) and “The Potbellied Virgin” (Alicia Yánez Cossío). “Edge Pieces,” a novel, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing. Find her at amaliagladhart.com.
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