Smoky Mountain Gazette Crossword Puzzle Contest

Smoky Mountain Gazette Crossword Puzzle Contest

Tell us why you do our crosswords !

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This here is my story of why I do your crossword puzzles:

My name’s Edna Hollister, I’m eighty-one, and I live on a mountain in North Carolina. I got no money, eight grandchildren, twelve great grandkids and a useless husband named Homer that sleeps half his life away. We live on Social Security and all I got going is about eight hundred dollars in the bank with monthly interest the size of a mouse turd. You could ask me Hey Edna what do you do to keep from going nuts? Well, one thing I got is your daily crossword puzzle, and I set here on our porch looking at our cows in the sun and I figure, me dropping out of school at sixteen, that solving your crosswords in The Smoky Mountain Gazette is my second chance for an education using words. I know words that nobody in these parts ever heard of, like azimuth, didactic, ratatouille.

I been a woman who all my life I’ve wanted to fix things, arrange things, put things right. I like my dishes set straight in the cupboard, my pillows primped up, and my Hummel figurines all facing the same 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 that snap when I shut my handbag. I love when things fit Just Right.

So when I’ve turned every crossword clue over in my mind, and finally have the fun of putting the right letter in the right box, it just makes me feel like I’ve baked a perfect pecan pie. 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 right word, I feel smart and tight and happy. But this here's the first time of me entering a contest.

You see, there are women like me who’ve never felt right in the world, who feel unrooted, uncertain, who worry over lost papers, missed chances, or where the heck they put the cap to the catsup. Oh, we’re okay, and we do right by the Bible, but our minds float like planets lost in space. We’re rooted to the world only by the little things a woman does, by the clean-up and fix-up of living—like sewing on a button, wiping off a shelf, or pinning up a note. Yet we still feel lost, like somebody who walked onto the wrong movie set many years ago and somehow got trapped in the wrong life.

Here on my porch in the seven o’clock light of this Spring day, I’m still the same lost person I was from way back, only now I got spots on the back of my hands and grandchildren to worry over. But every evening after supper I look forward to your Smoky Mountain Gazette Crossword Puzzle. And I always use a certain type pencil, a mechanical pencil where I can roll out the lead Just So.

Crosswords are my private life, the puzzles no one sees me do. Here with my pencil, I feel like I’m making a quilt on the page. So if nothing else has gone right in my day, I can still feel good knowing I made something turn out exactly right, with all the letters sitting in their boxes like lost baby birds I’ve returned to their nest.

This thing, this essay contest, this sets me thinking. I’ve never told this to a living soul: I write things down—those little things women have to record—like defrost hamburger, call hairdresser, buy 60 watt bulbs. But sometimes, just to ground my life, I write the time of day, too, like here where I’m putting 6:55 pm 4-16-25 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. Because for some reason God only knows, I need 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 I like putting things in their proper place, whether it’s my husband’s fishing rods or a nine letter word for today’s clue, One Who Wishes He Had a Brain ( Answer: Scarecrow ).

The fact is, I love words, even the ones I don’t use in everyday life. A lot of your crossword answers are more for writing than talking, you know, like for instance Confabulate, Consecrate, Consciousness, Deign, Decimate, Delegate, Exasperate, Emulate, or Exotic. A woman like me, living eighty-one years in the Smoky Mountains? Now, why would she need those words? My husband and I never need big words except when we seen a lawyer to write our Last Will and Testament. But for a woman who never went beyond tenth grade, it’s a proud feeling now and then to use a Fifty Dollar word.

You know, I never write much except sometimes a card to my sister in Tennessee, like Hi Dolly, Happy 75th, I hope your knee operation went OK. But having learnt some of your puzzle answers, some of them words lay shining in my mind like my holiday silverware—words I’d only use on special occasions. Last week I wrote a letter to a supervisor in Customer Service and I says Will you kindly deign to answer my letter? DEIGN ! Imagine me, Edna Hollister, using a word like that ! Ha Ha !

Some evenings, sitting alone here on my front porch, I look up at the fading afternoon and see little stars coming out on the sky. And I’m looking at those stars while I’m wracking my brain for the right word, and for some strange reason, I find peace doing your crosswords. It’s my way to forget about Me the person, Me the woman, Me the wife, and instead I become Me the Word Finder, and my heart stops aching and my worries go away. I do crosswords because my soul needs something that works out exact.

Because there’s only one word horizontal that will fit another word vertical, and when you make them match up, you feel like you’ve discovered something. Because a woman my age--reaching eighty-one with a bad leg, bills on the dresser and a husband no better than a buzzard—-we learn that life closes in every year that goes by. But when you can make order out of something, like spoons in a kitchen drawer, or sweaters in your closet, or a pile of papers set straight, it makes you feel like you got some control.

Anyway, last week I seen a clue in your puzzle with the title, WORLDY PROBLEMS. So I’m doing real well with my answers until I get to your strange clue--"Difficulties of Whatever Size"--- I was stumped for an answer that ran fifteen letters across the page, and doggone if it wasn’t the only one still unsolved until it hit me like a flash of lightning: HELL OR HIGH WATER. Made me feel—just for a second—like I’d found a silver dollar hidden in the grass.

And this, too: nobody scrawls in an answer exactly like another person, so when I see my letters all filled in right, they’re like well-behaved kids in a classroom, everybody in their right chair—some crisp and clean, others smudged and reconfigured—but they’re all ready for their Gold Stars, their Oreo cookies, their Group Photo.

I remember one September twilight sitting on my porch when I got every last letter of my crossword filled in total, and believe me it had some doozies like November Stone? (TOPAZ) and It Lasts Ten Years? (DECADE) and Winged Insect Eater? (VIREO). 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 we was so proud we cracked open a bottle of Elderberry Wine just to celebrate.

I finish my puzzles and I feel proud, like I’m somebody important, not just an old great grandma stuck here on a mountain. I look at my hard work, how I got Eighteen Across ( Garland Star ? JUDY ) and Twenty-Seven Down ( Movie Theatre Candy? GOOD AND PLENTY ) and how it all looks perfect, like when you open up a brand new box of chocolates.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This here’s my Crossword Puzzle Contest entry, and it’s the first paper I ever wrote since the tenth grade.

Edna Mae Hollister,

1701 Wagon Wheel Road

Dillsboro, NC. 28789

* * *