April Fooling

     My oldest brother loves jigsaw puzzles. As young adults we often had a puzzle-in-progress at family gatherings during Thanksgiving and Christmas. He still puts one together every year during the holidays as, half a continent away, we do also.

     I sent my brother a 1000 piece photomosaic jigsaw puzzle of Van Gogh’s Starry Night for Christmas this year. The photos were of astronauts, rockets, space shuttles, planets and satellites. It took him two weeks to assemble…well, almost assemble. When the puzzle was nearly complete he discovered that it was missing two pieces. He had two extra pieces in hand, but they wouldn’t fit in the last two empty spaces. My husband glibly suggested that, perhaps, he had put the puzzle together wrong.

     A few weeks later we received the puzzle in the mail with a challenge to find the missing pieces. It took us two weeks to assemble, and, strangely, all of the pieces fit. Our live-in daughter snapped a photo and put it on Facebook to prove we had done it. She posted the photo this morning.

     What my brother doesn’t know and won’t find out until he or his wife reads my blog is that I was so intrigued by the puzzle when I bought it for him, I bought an identical one for myself. That is the one we put together hoping that none of the pieces had gone astray. We pulled out all of the stops to finish it by April 1…April Fools Day.

     Do you think he will laugh as much as we did?