Come On Over By the "Fireside"

by guest blogger, Elmer Prather

My latest puzzle is a five-hundred-piece titled Fireside by Jim Mansel. To spend time putting a puzzle together, I must have a connection to it. My connection to this puzzle is my love for old log cabins. This puzzle certainly fits that bill. I have put several other puzzles together that highlighted an old cabin sitting on a lake.

Fireside 500pc assembled and photographed by Elmer Prather 

Puzzle pictures tell a story. The story I read as I put this puzzle together was “WELCOME TO MY HUMBLE CABIN.” The scene captured in this puzzle was an invitation for guests to sit by the brightly burning warm fire and enjoy each other’s company.

As I put this puzzle together, I watched the warm evening sky and the sun reflecting on the water come together. I imagined how it would feel if I were sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs placed near the glowing fire in the fire pit. This puzzle was special because it reminded me of a cabin our hunting and fishing club once rented to meet and plan hunting/fishing trips and to socialize. The cabin was built in the early 1900s for an executive with the Coca Cola Company. It overlooked a lake like the one pictured in the puzzle. It was built on forty acres of land abutting the Chattahoochee River just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. The old cabin has been torn down and the land is now a Nature preserve.

The cabin pictured in this puzzle has a massive rock chimney constructed of river rocks. There is a stack of firewood on the front porch to keep the fire burning. The cabin in this puzzle was probably constructed in the early 1900s since it has asphalt shingles on the roof rather than the wooden shingles found on older cabins. The cabin owner must be an angular since he has a boat tethered to the small dock by the lake.

The puzzle made a statement that the owners enjoyed spending time with their friends and neighbors. “Come on over.”