MySlavko ad: If you've ever carried a half-done puzzle on a cookie sheet, read this

At twenty to six every evening, for eleven years, I did a thing my husband calls the dance. I'd slide a piece of cardboard under whatever puzzle I was working on, lift it like a tray of eggs, carry it across the kitchen holding my breath, and set it on top of the washing machine. Then he'd set the table. In the morning I'd carry it back. I'm Linda. I'm 63. My husband Frank is 66, and Frank cooks. Every night, real dinner, two plates, the good placemats. He's done it since he retired and he's good at it, and I'm not going to be the woman who tells her husband to stop setting the table. But the table is also where my puzzle lives. There's nowhere else. We have a kitchen, a living room with a small round coffee table, and a spare room that's full of Frank's fishing things. The dining table is the only flat surface in the house big enough for a thousand pieces. So, the dance. Let me tell you what the dance costs, because nobody who hasn't done it believes me. It costs pieces. Every carry, something slides. You don't notice until three weeks later when the sky has a hole in it and you're on your knees under the washing machine with a flashlight. It costs the puzzle. Twice a day, you look at the thing you love and think, is it worth carrying tonight. Some nights it isn't. You leave it on the washer. Then it's been on the washer a week, with a dish towel over it so the cat stays off, and you walk past it on the way to the dryer and don't look. Then it's in the box. I used to finish a thousand pieces in ten days. By last year it was taking me a month, and not because I'd gotten slower. Because I'd gotten tired of the carry before I ever got tired of the puzzle. And it costs something I don't have a word for. You're sixty-three, in your own house, moving your own hobby out of the way of dinner like it's a child's toy on the stairs. I want to be fair to Frank. He never once said a word. Not once in eleven years. He'd stand there with the two plates and wait for me to finish the carry and that was that. If anything, he felt bad about it. He's the one who started trying to fix it. He bought me the roll-up felt mat first. You know the one. You lay the puzzle on it, roll it around a foam tube, tuck it in a corner. The first night I rolled up four hundred pieces of a lighthouse and in the morning two hundred of them were in the tube. Then he bought the folding card table and set it up in the corner of the living room by the window. That lasted a month. It wobbled every time I leaned on it. It was the wrong height for the couch and the wrong height for a chair. And the puzzle was now in a corner I had to go sit in, by myself, with my back to the room where Frank was. Then he found two big cookie sheets at a restaurant supply place and I'll give him this, they were better than the cardboard. But a cookie sheet is a cookie sheet. You can't lean a cookie sheet toward you. The pieces still slide. Every one of those fixes moved the puzzle. And moving was the whole problem. I didn't understand that yet. The day it broke was the Sunday before Thanksgiving last year. My sister and her husband were coming for dinner. I had a thousand-piece Venice on the table, three weeks in, the canals done, the sky about half. I did the dance. I'd done it two thousand times. The cardboard flexed in the middle, the way it does, and the whole left side of Venice went onto the kitchen floor. I didn't say anything. Frank didn't say anything. I got the dustpan. I swept Venice into the box, put the box in the hall closet, and told Frank I was done with puzzles for a while. He said okay, honey. He knew better than to say anything else. I didn't open the closet until March. What opened it was Ruth. Ruth is my neighbor. She's 71 and she's been a widow for six years and she's the one who feeds our cat when we're away and shovels the end of our driveway before we're up, because she says it keeps her honest. She came over in March to borrow a baking dish and saw the empty table and said, "Where's your puzzle?" I told her the Venice story. She listened the way Ruth listens, with her mouth shut, and then she said, "Come over tomorrow. I want to show you something and I don't want to explain it." Ruth's living room is small. One couch, one chair, a round coffee table the size of a bicycle wheel. On the coffee table was a puzzle. A thousand pieces, a farm stand, three-quarters done. It wasn't sitting on the table. It was sitting on a flat wooden board that rested on a round base of its own in the middle of the table, and the board stuck out past the edge of the coffee table on all four sides without wobbling. It was tipped up toward Ruth's chair, like a book on a stand. "Sit on the couch," she said. "Far end." I sat where you'd never sit to reach a puzzle. Ruth put one hand flat on the board and turned it. The whole thing came around on its base, slow and even, until the unfinished sky was in front of me. "Now watch." She lifted the whole board, one hand each side, kept it flat, and slid it under the couch. Pulled it back out. Nothing had moved. "That's dinner. That's the dance. Two seconds, and nothing goes on the floor." Then she told me the thing I'd been missing for eleven years. "Linda, every fix you tried moved the puzzle. The mat, the card table, the cookie sheets, the cardboard. All of them pick up the puzzle and carry it somewhere, and every carry costs you. This one doesn't move the puzzle. The puzzle stays on the board, on its own base. The table is just what's underneath. When Frank needs the table, the board comes off flat, in one piece, and goes under the couch, and the puzzle never knows it moved." "The table was never the problem. The carrying was." She showed me the rest the way you'd show someone your kitchen drawers. The stand has three settings, low, medium and steep; she keeps hers on medium so she's not bent over it all evening. The edges are raised all around so when it's tilted nothing slides. "Watch." She tapped it. Nothing moved. Four drawers pull out of the sides and lock, so edge pieces live in one, sky in another, instead of in a cereal bowl. A clear cover goes on when you stop. "My daughter got it for me last fall," she said. "I should have dragged you over here in November." I came home and told Frank. He said, "I'll find it," and he did, that night, at the kitchen counter, with his reading glasses on. He read the reviews out loud to me. One woman wrote that she no longer had to occupy the whole dining room table to finish a puzzle. Another wrote that the turntable made it easier for her and her husband to work on it together. Frank said, "That's you," and ordered the one for 1,500 pieces. It came in a big flat box, put together. I set the round base on the coffee table, the board on the base, tilted it to medium, and got Venice out of the hall closet. That was March. Here's what the dance looks like now. It's twenty to six. Frank comes in with the plates. I don't get up. The puzzle isn't on the dining table. It's on the coffee table in the living room, tilted toward my chair, where it's been for two weeks, and the dining table has been clear the whole time. We eat. We talk about nothing. After dinner Frank sits on the far end of the couch with the paper and I sit in my chair with the puzzle, and when he looks up and sees a piece I've been missing, he reaches over and turns the board a quarter-turn toward himself and pushes it in and turns it back. He's never done a puzzle in his life. He does that now. When my sister came in May, I lifted the board, slid it under the couch, and set out the cheese. She asked where my puzzle went. I told her to look under the couch. She did. She laughed for a full minute. Venice is finished. It's in a frame in the hall. I counted it up the other night. Eleven years, two carries a day. Call it eight thousand trips across the kitchen holding my breath. I don't do that anymore. I don't think about dinner at four o'clock with a knot in my stomach anymore. I'm not a child with a toy on the stairs anymore. The table is Frank's at six and mine at seven and nobody carries anything. Ruth and I do a puzzle together on Thursdays now, at her place or mine. Whoever's hosting slides the board out from under the couch. I bought a second one in September, for my sister. She's got the same table and the same husband and the same dance. I didn't tell her. It's wrapped. If you do the dance — If somebody already bought you the mat, or the card table, or the cookie sheets, and they all made it worse — If there's a box in a closet with a half-done puzzle in it that you told yourself you'd come back to — It's called the MySlavko™ All-in-One Rotating Puzzle Board. Two sizes: $115 for puzzles up to 1,500 pieces, $129 for up to 2,000. It ships free from their US warehouse, put together; you unpack it and bring out the puzzle. You get ninety days at home with it. If it isn't right, you email them, they pay the return shipping, and they refund you. The page says there are over 10,000 of these puzzle boards in U.S. homes. I believe it. Half the women I know do the dance. Ruth told me. I'm telling you. Get one. Then go get that box out of the closet, set it on the board, and leave it right there where you live. The table was never the problem.