Patience...

Well, another Christmas has come and gone. Only 3 days left in the year. All in all it's been a good year, despite some medical challenges and the "big Colorado flood" of 2013.

My little business is thriving. Maybe next year will be the year that I will actually earn enough money so my income will pay for more than the occasional family vacation to Germany...Our little old house is in desperate need of new windows and re stuccoing. When it's windy outside you can feel it through every crack. The woodwork is in need of a paint job, too. When you live in an old house like this you are always in fear of the plumbing...

I feel torn because I want to preserve the old wooden windows but I know they are not energy efficient, and we simply cannot afford to have them rebuild to preserve heat in the winter and cool air in the summers. Living in this house is like being in the elements pretty much. You don't need to look out the window to know what the weather is like outside. LOL.

Patience, Dear, I tell myself. It will all work out in time. Little by little we will save up the money and get things fixed. Like that puzzle that we did over Christmas. It took a lot of patience. It looked impossible to do when we first started.

It's been our 3rd year of doing a family puzzle on Christmas day. This year's was a pretty tough one.

 

Usually I am the one to get the puzzle started. I dump all the pieces on the dining room table and start picking out the straight edges. Then my husband will join in and help with the task. He does the sky, and I start putting together the bottom/ground part of this year's picture. We work together quietly and patiently.

Eventually our daughter walks by. She will help organize the puzzle pieces by color for a little while. Maybe she will find pieces of the castle and put parts of the building together outside the boarder. As the image slowly grows our boy will finally join the family. He has been texting his friends all morning, telling them how his parents are making him do this crazy puzzle every year on Christmas break. But after all his grumbling, he gets excited, too. Together we make great progress and the picture of a beautiful Castle in Scotland emerges.

I love puzzles. Even the hard ones. After all, life is the hardest puzzles given to us to solve. I hope that the picture I am creating during my lifetime will be mysterious and beautiful to look at - like the Scottish landscape and the deep blue sky over Elean Donan Castle.