Several weeks ago I posted about our "weekly puzzle." If you've been keeping score at home, we haven't had a weekly puzzle in a while. I'm happy to report that we finished another puzzle this week, a gift from our friend, Grace. However, as we were nearing the end on Wednesday night it seemed like the number of pieces we had left was fewer than the number of spaces to fill. Sure enough, there was a missing piece.
Every time I saw the puzzle for the next couple of days I was inspired to tear the cushions off of the couch and open every drawer and cupboard in our living room. Then, on Saturday, I realized that we had moved the couches closer together since starting the puzzle. I sprang into action, shifting the couch back to its original position and sure enough! There was the forlorn puzzle piece. Finally, the puzzle was complete! (At the time of this writing, my housemates still don't know that I've found and placed the last piece but they do subscribe to my blog so I've most certainly given myself up once this hits their inboxes).
This week at work I did more mailing and answered more hotline calls. When I was on the phone with a woman in detention, I had a moment of frustration when I couldn't understand her because of the poor phone quality and my sub-fluent Spanish. While I wanted to fix her problem and give her all the answers, she was grateful that someone was actually taking the time to speak with her about her situation. It was an important reminder of my role at the Florence Project and in the world. I have the responsibility to listen to people with empathy and do the work that I can to change the systems that produced those painful experiences but the work is not mine to do alone.
After these heavier phone calls, it was important that I had time to do relaxing things this week, too. Tuesday night we had a couple of our support committee members over for dinner. On Wednesday night we enjoyed trying to guess the flavors of caramels that our dinner guests brought us as a treat. On Thursday night we spent time with some other young adult volunteers at a free community dinner event mostly for immigrants and refugees in Tucson. Then, on Saturday our house went to see Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I haven't gotten to see too many movies in theaters for the last couple of years and it was fun to see a film on the big screen again and that I could share my nerdiness of Marvel movies with my housemates (thanks for joining me and listening to all of my comments).
This upcoming week will be a shorter work week because of Thanksgiving and I'm looking forward to some more time off and good food. It's currently 64 degrees and sunny here (sorry to all of you reading from your snow-covered houses up north) so I think we'll take advantage of the weather to do some hiking!
P.S. We did get our heater turned on this weekend and it's so nice to be able to wake up and not have a cold nose!
As a member of this household and a participant in the puzzling, I cannot say I am happy that I learned out about the found piece through this post...