A child looked at the map puzzle of their country.
“This one's way too easy.”
“Yeah, that one's really easy.”
They fitted the pieces into the board.
“Vietnam should be on here too.”
Their mother is from Vietnam. An adult asked whether there are rivers there like the one on the map, and what they had seen when they went.
They had been going back through photographs of the year — who they were with, where it was, what they had been playing. They picked out the ones they liked and made them into a book, and wrote next to them.
Then a photo of the whole class came back as a puzzle. They put it together looking for what had changed since.
And when they found themselves in it, they got into the same pose.
There were flags to look at — half a picture at a time, matching them up, comparing one country's flag against another's.
Then they drew the flag they liked best, cut their own drawing into pieces, and put it back together.
They tipped the big spring puzzle board out and started.
There were a lot of pieces. They picked them up at random and pushed them at the board.
“No, this one goes here.”
“This one does.”
One of them had done this puzzle before.
“I'll show you.”
It came together fast after that.
“We put it together!”
Then they tipped it out and did it again. And again.
They looked over the pieces of a summer painting, comparing colors and shapes, moving pieces around and turning them, one at a time.
Where it got hard, they turned a piece over and over, trying it each way round.
When it was finished, they swapped puzzles with each other and did it again.
They each picked up pieces of the zodiac animal puzzle and started matching. They said the animal names as they went.
“You go rat, ox, tiger — in that order, like this!”
They remembered the order between them and finished it together, the older ones passing pieces to the younger ones.
A child took the puzzle box down and spread the pieces out on the floor.
“That house has a tiled roof.”
The others heard it and came over, and they hunted for pieces together until the picture was finished.
“I guess there weren't any cars back then.”
“They're wearing hanbok.”
A child looked over a puzzle with numbers on the pieces.
“This is easy. I'll take the one without numbers.”
They took the picture puzzle instead, gathered the pieces into one corner of the table, picked up the first one, and looked hard at where the color and the lines went.
“This is a snail. I have to find the snail picture.”
They went looking for the rest of it, holding each piece up beside the one before to see if it carried on. When it didn't, they put it down and got another, until the whole picture ran through.
The puzzles came out with different numbers of pieces, so that everyone had one they could do.
The ones who had been saying they were the big kids now went for the board with the most pieces.
There was a word puzzle of things that go on roads.
“This one's a car, so I have to find the letter for car.”
“Here's the bus.”
They matched the letters and finished the words.
Then they carried the finished word card over and set it down on the road mat.
“This is the road the bus goes on.”
A child was working on a puzzle of an old painting.
“There's someone on a swing here.”
“They're wearing hanbok too — a red hanbok.”
Then it got hard.
“Will you do it with me?”
And they finished the painting together.
They were making a city out of their feelings, and they built it out of puzzle pieces and blocks.
The table was too small for it. So they moved it down onto the floor and carried on there, together.