It started when my friend Cathy handed me a sack of paperback books-on-loan. Swapping books is a practice we’d established over time. Some were meant to be returned, others were to be passed along to another; a sort of pay-it-forward.

This was an unusually big stack, and the bag sat on the dining table in the morning room for a couple of weeks. Finally, anxious to clear off the table, I emptied the bag and tossed the books on the end table by the sofa. Comprised of a sofa and two chairs, this space had felt somehow unfinished, lacking character or a central message. With the addition of the books, suddenly it was cozier, more inviting. That the books were much-read and dog-eared only served to add to the warmth of the effect.

One of the themes of the new house is to live life as if it were an ongoing vacation. Its décor and location both make it the “vacation home” in our eyes. And the summer homes we’ve rented at the ocean often have shelves of paperbacks – jewels and discards, shared by past readers, waiting to be discovered by us, welcoming us to sink into the sofa and enter new worlds, connecting us to the visitors who had preceded us.

And that is the way I wanted the new house to make our guests feel. Because that was another theme – to create a place that invited others to join me, to enter.

And what else, I asked myself as I looked at the suddenly-cozier arrangement, does that?

Puzzles.

Jigsaw puzzles!

My childhood included hours of puzzling at my aunt and uncle’s Wisconsin home on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. My visits were weeks dedicated to playing – adults playing with children. The cares and responsibilities of daily life – jobs, running a household – were somehow accomplished in secret or set aside by my aunt and my mother during this annual island of time. They sat on the floor and played cards with us – quadruple solitaire, spite & malice. When we were older, they taught us to play Mah Jongh with them. We had musical ensembles where I accompanied them on the piano as they on their violins alternated between serious effort and peals of laughter. At night we played scrabble.

And we worked puzzles. I was in awe of my aunt’s uncanny ability to pluck a single piece among hundreds and place it precisely where it fit.

But even beyond creating with my home an ongoing connection to such a positive experience from my childhood, solving jigsaw puzzles is a metaphor for my life and for my work as a therapist.

Each year, on my birthday and at Christmas, I choose a special gift for myself, just as I do for my children. It’s more of a hatching than a shopping process. An idea, amorphous at first, begins to consolidate. It goes through multiple renditions, each simpler than the last, as the extraneous elements are left behind and the pure notion emerges.

And so the puzzle table came to be. For my birthday, I purchased the coffee table that matches that end table where Cathy’s summer-reading books are stacked. My daughters and I looked through scores of jigsaw puzzles online to choose the first. My vision was of a puzzle always in the works on that coffee table, inviting people to sit down and add a piece.

Our first pick was a collage of seashells, reminiscent of our cherished trips to the ocean. Like all experienced puzzlers, we eagerly turned our energies to the frame, sorting other pieces by color as we went. Turning our heads for a moment, we were aghast to see Bailey, the puppy, chewing determinedly on a puzzle piece – and then another – scattering many more pieces to the floor.

But there was no rage over this, no compulsion to throw the puzzle out and buy another. Bailey is just the youngest member of our family – and, as such, is part of the larger tapestry of our lives together. So she was duly educated, and dog repellent was added to our puzzling supplies – along with a plexiglass table topper, cut to size by me, with little rubber feet, to protect our work between times. With no way of knowing how many pieces were missing, we picked up what we could find – including two pulpy masses that had no picture left at all, the photo apparently being the tastiest part.

My younger daughter’s boyfriend and I finished that puzzle together the other night. Not a fan of puzzles previously, he was drawn in, and we enjoyed that same industrious and easy companionship that I remembered from the summers long ago. As we worked on it, we would often find ourselves searching for the one unique piece that would fill a particular space. I would find myself saying, ‘That may be one of the missing pieces, we may never find that one.’ And I would let it go, an acceptance of a finished product with missing pieces that were gone for good, but whose existence was not in question at all.

The finished puzzle lacks two pieces. In this way, it is utterly perfect, and I think we will leave it under the plexiglass for a while. Because the finished product is a story, a memory, a record – a work of art made perfect by the two windows of table showing through. As for the lost pieces eaten up by Bailey who appreciated their flavor but not their meaning, no matter. The rest of the puzzle tells exactly what they looked like.