My cousin Janice is a surgical nurse. She has worked very hard all her life and still has six years to go before retirement. Until last year, she had never been out of the U.S. She’s a saver—one of the most frugal people I know, sensible in every way. Not what you would call a dreamer.
Several years ago, Janice worked a jigsaw puzzle. The picture was a little village on a bluff above the ocean. Pastel houses clinging to the sides of a steep ravine that ended in a tiny, turquoise harbour surrounded by a rocky coast. The caption read: Cinque Terre, Italy.
The Cinque Terre coast is impressive even without the villages.
Janice wrote to me a few months ago to say that she was bringing her mom to visit my mom. She sent me a list of places she was interested in visiting, and one was Cinque Terre. She had not forgotten it.
I didn’t know about the jigsaw puzzle, but I checked into the area on the Mediterranean coast. Because they would be flying out of Pisa, it made sense to put Cinque Terre as the last stop on our itinerary.
They landed, and we hit the ground running (mostly to keep up with my mom, who can flat book it on her walker). The Leaning Tower, Venice, Naples, the Isle of Capri, Pompeii, even three days in Switzerland. And finally, Cinque Terre.
This is the actual puzzle.
Cinque means “five” in Italian. Five fishing villages lined up the rocky coast. I knew most of them are steep and not handicapped friendly, so I decided that my mom and I would just take a boat ride and see them from afar. Janice and her mom set off to explore by themselves. By now, Janice had told me about the puzzle and even shown me a picture of it. I hoped she would get to see that same view.
She did. But more than that, she spent an afternoon in Riomaggiore, exploring its tiny backstreets, having a pizza with her mom in a little trattoria. She entered into the landscape she had studied so minutely while working the jigsaw puzzle. She told me it gave her chills, that it was the perfect ending to their trip.
This is what she will remember long after the cathedrals and the walled, medieval villages and even the amazing food have faded into one blur.
The puzzle town in real life. Riomaggiore.
This is a common experience for writers. For we begin with imagination. Sometimes we do the research first, but more often we wait to see if this story idea is going to come alive before we commit to the expense of a trip. I wrote a whole novel set in Strasbourg before I ever saw its half-timbered houses, though I could describe the giant beams held together with wooden pegs, the walls insulated with clay and chopped straw, each one whitewashed and brightened with folk art symbols.
Several writers have told me that when they finally stood before the piece of art, the monastery, the concentration camp around which their story was created, they cried.
You may be a surgical nurse or anything else. But to live in the imagination is to think like a storyteller.
These streets just say, “Wander . . . wander . . .”
To be curious. To embrace mystery. Even to go in search of it, whether it’s across the ocean or around the corner. To look beyond the daily commute and the scrubs in the laundry into a strange little village in a jigsaw puzzle and to imagine what might be down that alley, around that corner, what sights and smells are common to the people who live there and what are their worries and joys and fears.
“Only” the world of imagination, but it is also the beginning of adventure, of reflection, of connection. Whatever your life’s journey, a jigsaw puzzle may turn out to lead to the highlight of your trip.
Finding our stories . . . and ourselves.
–Alison