My father and I were putting together a puzzle in the shape of an owl. It was much harder than it seemed because the edges followed the pattern of the owl’s feathers. There was no neat rectangle, no easy beginning in finding the straight edges and the corner pieces.

He was the one who taught me to start that way, and it began when I was young enough that my feet barely touched the shag green carpet in my bedroom. We had a table dedicated to puzzles right next to my bed, and the two of us sat and assembled pictures of candy on Halloween, of Santa scenes in winter, and carpets of flowers in the summer.

Before the owl, we had finished an entire scene of a quaint, New England oceanside town with brightly painted cabins and fishing buoy decor. But the owl proved a bigger challenge.

We are a good assembly team and this one took us a full ten minutes before we could put together even two pieces. My phone beeped. Given I was making little progress as well, I checked it. My husband had texted me a picture of my youngest son. They were attending a festival in our home state. Look what we found, read the message. A snake – the huge, thick kind that you would never want to run across in the jungle – was draped across the shoulders of my eldest.

And there, perched on the shoulders of my youngest was an owl. The precise species pictured on the puzzle my father and I worked on.

“My goodness,” I exclaimed, and showed it to my dad.

The thread that ran from grandfather to grandson that day was a great horned owl. Both in picture and in real life, the creature’s eyes were full to the brim of knowing, wisdom, and deep observation.

The owl watched over all of us: my husband and sons five states away, my father sitting next to me with a body full of memories.

The owl stitched us together: sitting on the shoulder of a child and being haltingly put together on a table on a humid afternoon in the flat city of my childhood.

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