SpringfieldNewsSun.com

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Most mornings, if you walk into the main entrance of Oakwood Village and look up through the atrium to the second-floor landing, you can see, through the rails, three or four Oakwood residents working on a jigsaw puzzle.

It's there, on the landing where people come out of the elevators with their walkers, scooters and canes, that Amy Barnhart and John Kunkle have been solving a puzzle of our older years.

At 99, Barnhart has a smile as fresh as spring and looks younger than most of the passers-by.

She arrived at Oakwood after her husband of 63 years, John Barnhart, died in August 1989. "I moved in the following April," she said.

She takes some pride in being the only one who has spent a full 18 years in independent living there.

In a place where so many people struggle with strength in their knees to get upright, she likes to use her spryness for the common good.

"I can get there and back before you can get out of your chair," she says.

So she helps others out.

Kunkle has been struggling of late. The prostate cancer he was treated for 15 years ago has come back and invaded his bones, making them ache.

Emily Smith, who puzzles regularly with Kunkle and Barnhart, noticed an obvious symptom a week ago Friday.

"He got to where he was quiet and not saying anything," said Smith, who, like Kunkle, is 86.

Quiet is not like Kunkle, whose smile has the power to complete some kind of human circuit with almost any face it falls upon, the warm-up to a conversation.

His sister, Ruth Bayley, recalled a disquieting period in Kunkle's life when he moved into Oakwood six years ago.

"He was so despondent because it only had been a year since Betty (his wife of 49 years) had died," she said. "They were so close."

"That's where Amy came in," Mrs. Bayley said. "She's been a godsend."

Barnhart's welcoming smiles and welcoming ways drew Kunkle to the jigsaw puzzle table, where 1,000-piece puzzles are the rule and lots of time is required.

Pieces are sorted by color and shape onto a series of paper plates wearing thin at the edges from constant use. The puzzle border is assembled first, of course, then the fill work is tackled, bit by bit.

The current puzzle is a toughy: A cloudy sunset reflected on a mirror lake.

"We think every puzzle we do now is harder than the one before," Smith said with a smile.

"We do think they're cutting them different," added a discerning Barnhart.

It was over the course of hundreds of puzzles that Barnhart and Kunkle discovered they were a good fit for one another, Smith said.

In addition, each had needs the other fulfilled.

"John can't handle a cane in one hand and a cup of soup in another," his sister said. So Barnhart has brought it back to the table for him from the noon buffet.

"Sometimes I don't know what to get him," she said, "but he eats everything I bring."

For his part, Kunkle has offered a kind of friendly taxi service for Barnhart.

"If I would tell him I'm tired he would whirl his (scooter) around and pat his knees," she said.

She'd take a seat, "and we'd go flying home."

It was after he had visited her in the hospital and she was returning a favor by visiting him during a rehabilitation stint at the Ohio Masonic Home that the two reached another level of closeness.

"I hadn't seen him in about two months, and he opened his arms (to hug her) and that was it," she said. "He was so tickled to see me, and I was glad to see him after all that time."

Kunkle went back to the hospital last week after suffering through a night of distracting pain that hasn't stopped.

Late in the week, a doctor has injected him with radioactive pain medicine to help, and Kunkle's daughter brought Barnhart to his hospital room for another reunion.

"He was just tickled," his daughter said. As was Barnhart.

Back at Oakwood, the puzzling partners are saving a final portion of the puzzle for him.

The scene on the second floor landing won't be complete without him.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com

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