Crosswords in My Life

The Mountain Star

Sylva County’s Local Newspaper

Contest of the Month:

“Tell Us What Our Crossword Puzzles Mean to You”

*****************

Crosswords in My Life

Contest Entry from Edna Hollister

My name is Edna Hollister and I live here on a mountain in North Carolina. I have no money, one son living, one daughter dead, and a useless husband named Homer that sleeps half his life away. We live on Social Security, and all I got going is a pork roast simmering on the stove and about eight hundred dollars in the bank with monthly interest the size of a mouse turd. You could ask me Hey Edna what you do to keep from going nuts? Well, all I've got is your daily crossword puzzle, and I set here on our porch watching snowflakes falling on our barn, and I figure this here is my education in words. I know words that nobody in these parts ever heard of. Listen here: Azimuth. Didactic. Ratatouille. I’m submitting my essay to the Crossword Editor who says Tell us what our crosswords mean to you. They mean a lot, believe me.

I've been a person that all my life I’ve wanted to fix things, to put things right. I like my dishes set straight in the cupboard, my pillows primped up, my Hummel figurines all facing the right way. Finding the right word—finding the only word that’ll fit in a crossword space—is a comfort to me, like when I tuck in my bedsheets real tight or hear the snap when I shut my handbag. I love when things fit Just So.

So when I’ve turned every clue over in my mind, and have the fun of putting the right letter in the right box, it makes me feel like—how do I say this—like I’ve done a pecan pie just right. When I’m doing your crosswords, my thoughts fly around my brain like a bird looking for just the right-size twig for its nest, and when I find that letter, and fill in that one word that fits, I feel smart and tight and happy.

I imagine all over the world there are people like me who’ve never felt right in the world, who feel unrooted, uncertain. Who worry over lost papers, or where the hell they placed the cap to the catsup. Oh, we’re here, and we do right by the Bible, but our lives are afloat, and we stay stuck to the world by the little things a woman does, the cleanup and fix-up of living. Sewing on a loose button, wiping off a shelf, pinning up a note. But we still feel lost, like someone in a black-and-white movie from the 1940’s where all the stars are now dead and gone. But behind it all, like now on my porch in the six o’clock light of a snowy day, I’m still the same lost person I was from way back, only now I got spots on my hands and family to worry over. But every evening after supper I look forward to your Mountain Star Crossword Puzzle.

Crosswords are my private life, the puzzles no one sees me do. It’s a time when my brain acts like a weasel looking for right letters in the forest. Here with my eyes and my pencil, I feel like I’m making a quilt on the page. So if nothing else goes right in my day, I can feel good just the same, knowing I've solved your crossword puzzles, with every letter sitting in its proper place,.

This thing, this essay contest, this sets me thinking. Here’s the Real Me, and I never told this to a living soul: I make notations, those little things that women have to record, like defrost hamburger, call hairdresser, pick up medicine at store, and sometimes, just to ground my life, I write the actual Time I wrote something, like here where I’m putting 5:55 pm on 11–28-25 for no doggone reason except to ground myself in this here minute, like the way a writer puts a period at the end of a sentence just to nail it down and make it stick.

For some reason, I like clean edges on everything. I want my checkbook balanced to the penny, my dishes stacked a certain way, and my fingernails filed even. So maybe I need crosswords because every day they give me a fresh chance to make something come out perfect. I see snowflakes falling on our porch, and I read somewhere that every snowflake is perfect, that they’re symmetrical, like the designs you see through a kaleidoscope.

I can’t shape a snowflake, yet I can fill in the missing spaces in a crossword puzzle. And it irks me when I can’t find the right answers, though I know Life don’t come with answers to everything your heart yearns to understand.

This here is my truth. I love words, even the ones I don’t ever use in life. A lot of your crossword answers are words used for writing more than talking. You know, like for instance Deign or Decimate or Dalliance. Confabulate, Consecrate, or Consciousness. Exasperate, Emulate, or Exotic. A woman like me, living fifty years in the Smoky Mountains, now why would she need those words? My husband and I never need big words except for making out our Wills. But for a woman who never went beyond the tenth grade, it’s a proud feeling now and then to think of a fifty dollar word and to learn its special meaning. It feels great.

You know, I never write much except maybe a card to my cousin in Tennessee, like Hi Dolly, Happy 75th, I hope your knee operation went OK. But the truth is that I find comfort in doing your crosswords. It’s my way to forget about Me-the-Housewife, Me-the-Grandma, Me-the-Woman-in-an-Apron, and instead I become Me-the-Word-Finder. I do crosswords because I need something in my life that works out exact. Because there’s only one word horizontal that will fit with another word vertical, and when I make them match up, I feel like I’ve worked out something important. Like designing a once-in-a-lifetime snowflake.

And this, too: nobody writes a letter exactly like another person, so when I see my letters all lined up right, they’re like little tykes in a classroom. Every kid in their right seat. And they’re all ready for their Gold Stars, their Oreo cookies, their Group Photo.

I remember one day, one winter day years ago, when snowflakes fell like lace against our windows, when I first got every last letter of a crossword filled in just perfect.. And believe me, it presented some doozies like November Stone? ( OPAZ) and It Lasts For Years? (DECADE) and Winged Insect Eater? (VIREO) and Garland Star ? (JUDY). So Lord Help Me, when I got my final letter in place, I called out to my husband

Homer ! I did it ! I got every letter ! And he was so proud he cracked open a bottle of Elderberry Wine just so we could celebrate. And that puzzle from twelve years ago now sits in a picture frame right over my vanity.

Submitted by Edna Mae Hollister 148 Red Maple Tree Lane, Whittier, NC 28789