I am lucky.
- My family is not sick - neither here, nor back in ye ole country. (Knock on wood.)
- Work can be done from home.
- My children don't need to be home schooled - they are (almost) adults and (almost) responsible. The organized learning taking place in my house is mainly me learning to assemble face shields.
- I can go outside and weed my lawn, clean my gutters for oak flower residue, wash my windows... Some people shelter in considerably less space than I have available.
All the same, being stuck at home for months on end without the diversion of seeing friends, taking trips to the beach or to the mountains, going to the movies... lost its attraction after around two days.
Hence the puzzle. Apparently puzzle producers have solid back orders during this lock down.
This particular puzzle was left in our house by a neighbor some years back. I am sure she now wishes she had brought it with her when she moved to another state. For a couple of days its 1000 pieces created some diversion.
The assembling was bittersweet. When you put something like this together you really look at each flower - and for me that means naming them. Starting in the middle with the first spring flowers is a small group of vintergækker, krokus, påskeliljer. The tall pink plant in the lower right corner is a fingerbøl blomst. The big yellow in the top left corner is a solsikke.
Sorry: snowdrops, crocus, daffodils, foxglove, sunflower. But if you felt a little lost for a second, welcome to my life.
Because... all the other plants. What is a bonderose in English? Whoever would have imagined that the very lovely and common garden plant that directly translated "should" be called lion's mouth is really called a snapdragon? Or that hollyhock = stokrose?
Thanks to Google I feel a little better because some of the names that I remember from ye ole country appears to be the latin family names. So it is perfectly OK to call a primrose for a primula or a marigold for a tagetes.
Not that it helps you a lot if somebody talks about a morning glory and you have no clue what it is.
Lovely. That is what a morning glory is. That is what they all are.
You can find more of the artist's work here; browsing the galleries is soothing - much better for you than browsing Twitter (and I am really happy that I didn't try my hand at a 1000 piece puzzle of some of her much quieter paintings.)