Hello, and welcome to our little corner. I'm Betty, and Herb is in the other room pretending he isn't going to read this over my shoulder. We're both retired (Herb from the railroad after 34 years, me from the school cafeteria after 22) and we live in a small house with a sunroom and a card table, and on that card table, every day of the year, there is a jigsaw puzzle.

It started the first winter after Herb retired, in January of 1996. He was driving me up the wall. Our daughter brought over a 500-piece puzzle of a covered bridge "to give Dad something to do," and he did it in two days, and then I did the next one with him, and that was that. We've done 61 puzzles since (as of this week), and Herb keeps a log in a spiral notebook, and our grandson said, "Grandpa, that should be on the Internet," and here we are. He set it up; I type it.

We are not experts. We just like it. A puzzle is a good way to spend an evening with someone you've been married to for 41 years: you don't have to talk, but you can, and there's always something to do with your hands.

Everybody has their own way. This is ours, and it's gotten us through 61 of them.

1. Turn every piece face up first. Every single one, before you do anything else. Herb hated this the first year and now he's the one who insists on it. You'll find pieces later that you never would have seen.
2. Edges first. Pull every straight-edged piece as you turn them over and put them in the box lid. Build the frame. Now you know how big it is and where everything goes. Corner pieces go in a teacup so they don't get lost.
3. Sort by color into pie tins. We have a stack of old aluminum pie tins, and each one gets a color: all the reds, all the sky, all the water, all the "I don't know what this is." Sort while you watch the news. Sorting is half the puzzle and most people skip it and then wonder why it's taking so long.
4. Do the things with words and faces first. Signs, buildings, animals, anything with a clear picture. They go fast and they give you islands to build out from.
5. Save the sky for last, and do the sky by shape, not color. When you've got 200 pieces of the same blue, color is useless. Sort them by the shape of their knobs and holes: two knobs across from each other, two knobs next to each other, three knobs, one knob. Then you're only trying twenty pieces in a spot instead of two hundred. Herb figured this out on a sunset puzzle in 1997 and it changed our lives. Same for water, grass, and the dreaded "all one kind of fall leaves."
6. Good light. A gooseneck lamp on the card table, pointed down. Daylight is best, so the sunroom. Colors that look the same at night are two different colors in the morning.
7. Get up and walk away. When you're stuck, you're stuck. Go make tea. When you come back you'll see a piece in the first ten seconds that you stared past for an hour. Every time.
8. Keep the box lid propped up where you can both see it. Herb made a little wire stand.
9. A board you can slide. See below, under the card table. This is the best tip on the page.
10. Count the pieces when you open a used one. Not all of them, just enough to know if it's been opened. And when you finish, before you break it up, look for the empty spot. If a piece is missing, write it on the box ("1 missing, lower left, red barn") so the next person knows. That's puzzle manners.
11. Keep the cat off the table. We don't have a cat. Our neighbor's cat comes in the sunroom window. We lost a piece of a lighthouse to that cat in 1998 and found it in April under the radiator.

The card table is the one we got as a wedding present in 1958. It has a wobble that we fix with a folded matchbook, and it lives in the sunroom by the window, and it is not to be used for cards anymore. Cards are on the kitchen table now.

Here's the thing that makes it all work. A puzzle takes days, sometimes weeks, and in the meantime you need the table for company or you need to vacuum. So in 1996 Herb went out to the garage and cut a piece of plywood a little bigger than the biggest puzzle we'd ever want to do, sanded the edges, and glued a piece of green felt on top. The felt keeps the pieces from sliding, and the whole board slides: lift it off the card table and slide it under the couch, puzzle and all, half-done, and nothing moves. Company comes, the puzzle goes under the couch. Company leaves, out it comes. When we need more room, we put the pie tins of sorted pieces on a cookie sheet, and the cookie sheet goes under there too.

Herb has since made three more of these for people at the senior center, and he says if you ask nicely he'll tell you the measurements. (It's a 30-by-40-inch board, half-inch plywood, felt from the fabric store. There. Now you don't have to ask.)

When we finish one, we leave it on the table for three days "to admire it," and then Herb breaks it up and I put it back in the box, and we pick the next one. The three days are important. You worked hard.

Puzzle number 48 in the log: "Harbor at Dawn," 3,000 pieces. Fishing boats, a stone pier, a lighthouse, fog, and about a square yard of pinkish-gray sky and pinkish-gray water that were, as far as we could tell, the same color. Our son gave it to us for Christmas 1998 as a joke. It was not a joke to us.

It was too big for Herb's board. It was too big for the card table. Herb put a sheet of plywood across two sawhorses in the sunroom and there it stayed, from December 27, 1998, to March 21, 1999. Twelve weeks. Eighty-four days. We had to move the rocking chair into the hall.

The edges took a week by themselves. The boats and the lighthouse took two weeks and were the fun part. Then there was nothing left but sky and water, about 1,800 pieces of it, and January. We did the sky by shape, as above, a pie tin at a time, and some nights we'd put in six pieces and go to bed. Herb said we should give up in February. I said we'd never given up on a puzzle. He said we'd never done a stupid puzzle. We did not speak about it for a day and then we both went back to the sawhorses that evening without saying anything and did eleven pieces.

The last piece went in on the first day of spring, at about 4:30 in the afternoon, and it was a piece of water, lower right, and Herb put it in and we just sat there. Then we called our son and told him what we thought of him, and then we told him we loved him, and then we left it on the sawhorses for a full week instead of three days. Every neighbor came to see it.

Rating: five out of five, but we will never do it again, and it went to the exchange with a note that said "all 3,000 present, God help you." Somebody took it in April. We've heard nothing since.

Puzzles aren't cheap, and once you've done one, there it sits. So in the fall of 1997 Betty (that's me, I'm just saying it the way Herb would) talked the senior center into a bookshelf in the back of the craft room, and that's the Puzzle Exchange. About forty puzzles on it at any given time. It works like this:

• Bring one, take one. Or just bring one, if you're feeling generous. Or just take one, if you're new, and bring one back when you're done. Nobody's counting. (I'm counting a little.)
• The rubber band rule. Every box gets two big rubber bands around it so it doesn't spill in the trunk of somebody's car. There's a coffee can of rubber bands on the shelf.
• The note rule. Tape a note to the lid: how many pieces (as best you know), whether any are missing and where, and how hard you thought it was. Sign it if you want. Some people write a whole review.
• No missing edges. A missing middle piece is a shame. A missing edge piece is a crime, and that puzzle goes to the kids' room at the library with a note.
• Second Saturday of the month, 10 a.m., is when most people come and swap, and there's coffee, and it turns into a couple of hours of people telling each other about their puzzles, which is the real point.

The exchange has about fifteen regulars now. There's a gentleman who only does puzzles of trains, a lady who does two 1,000-piece puzzles a week and we don't know how, and a young mother who comes with her five-year-old and takes the 100-piece ones off the bottom shelf. Herb has built three sliding boards for people who asked. If you're in our town and you're reading this, come on the second Saturday and ask for Betty and Herb. We're the ones by the coffee.

From Herb's spiral notebook, copied out by Betty. Ratings are out of five stars and are Herb's and mine averaged, with arguments noted. Puzzles are listed by their picture; we don't keep track of the brands, just the pieces. "Days" is from opening the box to the last piece.

(The numbers we skipped are all 500- and 750-piece ones that came and went in a weekend and didn't earn a story. Herb has them in the notebook if you must know. The full list, all 61, is coming when our grandson is home at Thanksgiving.)

Up next: Number 62 is a 2,000-piece one of a covered bridge in autumn, the big brother of number 1, which our daughter found and gave us for our anniversary. Herb says we start it October 1st. I say we start it when the schoolhouse has had its three days. We'll start it October 1st.