When recent Boston College grads Nicola Tufts and Mary Heitkamp treated themselves to a trip to Paris last year, they still faced a seven-hour layover in the Toronto airport thanks to their budget itinerary. So they did what not just anyone would do — they started working on a 1,000-piece puzzle, right there in the terminal.
Both longtime puzzle-lovers, they were just looking to fill the time. But something else happened. “So many people in the course of the day stopped by to help or to smile or to share their memories of doing puzzles,” Heitkamp said.
They tried it again in the Luxembourg Garden in Paris. “Again,” according to Heitkamp, “almost everyone made a connection, even though we weren’t speaking the same language.”
An idea was born. Last spring the roommates officially launched Piece on Earth, a pop-up puzzle movement with the heady subtitle, “Building puzzles to break down barriers.” So far, they’ve facilitated 11 crowd-sourced puzzle days, most in the Boston Public Garden, most with the same 1,000-piece puzzle featuring colorful candy that they did in Toronto’s airport. “Doing puzzles in a public place is a great way to start conversation,” Tufts explained.
Even though it’s getting cold, they’ll host one more this year, tomorrow, Dec. 4, at the Prudential Center mall in Boston. With an expected crowd of 10,000 attempting to break the world caroling record, they won’t be lacking collaborators.
Every time they go out, the founders say, they meet interesting people. Heitkamp fondly remembers getting help from a homeless man. “It was neat to be able to sit with him for a couple hours and have an experience with someone I never thought I would be hanging out with,” she said. Tufts remembers a mom and her two daughters from Israel who stopped to place a few pieces and explained where they came from and why they were in Boston. Recently, Piece on Earth completed a world map puzzle with help from tourists from close to 20 countries.
They’ve come a long way from the beginning, when Tufts remembers thinking, “What if nobody stops? What if nobody has any interest in this?” Now they have groupies of sorts, people who stumbled across them but now follow their events and come again and again.
A 1,000-piece puzzle takes about six or seven hours, so there’s plenty of time for conversation beyond, “Hey, hand me that red corner piece.” As Heitkamp said, “It’s more of a statement than anything to be able to sit with people you don’t know and find some common ground.”
Photo by Piece on Earth via Flickr.