Jamie Collins Facebook ad: “Read this if you know someone who puzzles often”

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My wife only does her big puzzles when I leave town. It took me 34 years and one comment from a neighbor to find that out. I haven't gotten over it yet. Let me explain, because if you live with a puzzler, this might be happening in your house too. My wife Karen is 63. She's loved puzzles since before I met her. When we were first married, there was always one going somewhere in our little apartment. On the coffee table. On a card table. Once on an ironing board, I swear. Somewhere over the years, that stopped. I didn't notice when. You don't notice things that fade slowly. These days she does a puzzle maybe twice a year. Small ones. I figured that was just life. We got busy. She got busy. People change. I was wrong about all of it. Here's how I found out. Every fall, I go fishing with my brother for five days. Been doing it twenty years. Last October, I came home a day early. Didn't tell Karen, wanted to surprise her. I walked in and stopped in the doorway. The dining room table was covered, edge to edge, with a 1,500-piece puzzle. Half done. Bowls of sorted pieces everywhere. Her reading glasses sitting on top of the box. A cold cup of tea next to her chair. It looked like the apartment we had in 1992. She came around the corner, saw me, and her face did something I'll never forget. She looked caught. Like a kid with cookies before dinner. And the first thing out of her mouth was, "Oh no, you're early. I'll have this cleared off by tonight." I'll have this cleared off by tonight. I stood there holding my duffel bag, trying to understand why my wife was apologizing to me. In her own house. For her own hobby. I told her to leave it. She didn't. It was boxed up by dinner. The next week, our neighbor Sue was over, and she said something to Karen that knocked the wind out of me. She said, "Did you finish your fishing-week puzzle? I love your big puzzle weekends." Your big puzzle weekends. Sue knew. The neighbor knew. There was a whole pattern in my wife's life that I had never once seen, because it only happened when I wasn't there. That night I couldn't sleep, so I did the math like a crazy person. Five days of fishing in the fall. A work trip or two. A weekend at my brother's. Call it ten days a year that I'm gone. Ten days. That's the window my wife had given her favorite thing in the world. The other 355 days, the table was for us. For my poker night. For dinners. For the grandkids' craft projects. Nobody made that rule. I sure didn't. I would have told you, honestly, that I'd never once asked her to put a puzzle away. But I didn't have to ask. That's the part that got me. Thirty years ago, some guest probably needed the table. Then a holiday. Then my card game. And each time, she cleared her puzzle off without a word, until somewhere along the way she just stopped starting them at all. Unless I was gone. She wasn't hiding it from me like a secret. She was being polite. For three decades. I called our daughter Beth about it, half hoping she'd tell me I was overthinking. She went quiet for a second. Then she said, "Dad. She's done that my whole life. When you'd go hunting with Grandpa, Mom would have a puzzle out before your truck left the driveway. We used to call it Mom's vacation." Mom's vacation. My being gone was her vacation. Sit with that one for a minute. Beth teaches special education, and she said something that stuck with me. She said at school, they watch what kids do when nobody's assigning them anything, because that's who they really are. "Mom's puzzle weekends are who she really is, Dad. The rest of the year she's just being considerate." So her birthday was coming in December, and I decided I wasn't buying her another sweater. I was going to fix the actual problem. She needed a way to have a puzzle going AND a dining table. At the same time. Every day of the year, not ten. I found out those exist. They're called puzzle boards. And then I found out most of them are junk. I spent three nights reading reviews the way I read them when I bought my truck. Skip the five stars. Go straight to the one stars. Same story on almost every board. The "wood" is pressboard with a picture of wood printed on it, and it sags inside a year. The drawers have little magnets that fall off, so pieces spill when you carry it. The felt surface grabs pieces so hard you can't slide anything, and real puzzlers hate that. And the weight. Review after review from people saying the board was too heavy for their wife or their mother to move alone. That last one would have killed the whole idea. A board Karen can't lift by herself isn't freedom. It's a bigger version of the same problem, and I'd have paid $130 for it. So my list got simple. Real build that won't sag. Drawers that stay shut when it's carried. A smooth surface where she can slide her sections around. Light enough for her to move with one hand. And a solid cover, so the puzzle can leave the table and come right back, untouched. Almost nothing checked every box. The Nova Board from Puzzle Nova did. I'll be straight with you, it cost more than the cheap ones. But I'd already learned what the cheap ones become. They become the reason she goes back to waiting for fishing week. She opened it on her birthday and didn't say much at first. Just ran her hand over it. It's a genuinely nice-looking thing, more like furniture than a gadget, which mattered to her more than I expected. Then she read the box and looked up at me with a question on her face. And I said the sentence I'd been practicing. "You don't have to wait for me to leave anymore." She knew exactly what I meant. She put her hand over her mouth. Sixty-three years old, and my wife teared up over a puzzle board, and I had to look out the window for a second myself. That was eight months ago. Here's what our house looks like now. There's a puzzle going almost all the time. When we need the table, she slides the cover on, picks the whole board up with one hand, and sets it on the hutch. Ten seconds. Every sorted piece stays in its drawer. My poker night happens. Sunday dinner happens. And Monday morning, her puzzle is right back where it was, exactly how she left it. She's finished six big puzzles since December. Six. That's more than the last five years combined. And two weeks ago, I did something I hadn't done since our first apartment. I sat down next to her and worked on the sky for an hour. Turns out I missed it too. I just didn't know it, because the thing I missed only used to exist when I was gone. So here's what I'd tell any husband, or anyone who lives with a puzzler. If her puzzles only come out when the house is empty, that's not a coincidence. And if she barely does them anymore, don't assume she outgrew it. She might just be paying a price for it that you've never seen, because she made sure you never saw it. Another puzzle for Christmas won't fix that. A board that lets the puzzle and the family share the same house will. Do your homework on build and weight, because most boards out there are junk in a wood costume. The one that passed my three nights of research was the Nova Board, and it's the best gift I've given my wife in 34 years of marriage. Not because of what it does for the puzzle. Because of what it told her. She doesn't have to wait for my truck to leave the driveway to be herself.

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Read this if you know someone who puzzles often 🧩👆

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