cornucopia.

Way back in the fifth grade, spelling was a school subject (as opposed to the fun extracurricular activity that it is now). At the beginning of the week, we were given a themed list of ten words. If we were studying the southwest, we'd have to learn pueblo and adobe. If it was late November, the words would be things like turkey, pilgrim, and cornucopia (extra credit).

Come Friday morning, there would be a spelling test where we would be required to write out the words on a piece of paper as they were called out by the teacher. Throughout the week, we'd be given small assignments to work with the words to help us learn their proper order of letters. We'd have to write out definitions or use each word in a sentence. Maybe we'd have to write a short story that used all the words. But my favorite exercise was to make up a word search.

We'd be given a piece of empty grid paper. Our assignment was simply to write the spelling words in the empty grid (forwards, backwards, horizontally, vertically, diagonally), then fill in all the other empty boxes with other letters. The next day, the teacher would redistribute these puzzles to the class, and we'd have to solve someone else's word search.

Creating a word search brought out a weird side of me. This particular kind of puzzle can only be so difficult. In the end, they can always be solved with an organized method and some patience. Knowing this, I still set out to make the most
difficult game I could. A lot of the kids would just give the answers in their puzzles away by filling in the grid in alphabetical order. So the top line of the puzzle would look like this:

A B C D E F C O R N U C O P I A G H I J K L M N O P R S

I sought to avoid a puzzle that would insult the intelligence of whomever was selected by fate to complete it. So first off, I would at least mix up the letters when I was doing the final step of filling in the blank grid boxes.

But there were other kids who had caught on to this trick as well. I like to think that I took word search making to a new level, at least for the fifth grade. I would actually put partial words in there. So while "cornucopia" might be in the fourth row, going backwords, "cornucopmq" would be in the second column, going down. I snickered as I made my puzzles, imagining my peers tracing their pencils down the word, their excitement mounting, only to find a rogue letter 'M.'

That was mean enough. But I even one-upped myself. I would even put misspelled words in the puzzle. Of course, I would put the correct word in, too, but there might also be a "cornocopia" or a "cornucopea" as well. I remember one week when the theme was state capitals. Ruby, the poor, unsuspecting girl who had been assigned my puzzle came up to me in class and pointed out to me that I had misspelled our own capital city Raleigh by switching the 'E' and 'I.' Ah, no, I explained confidently to Ruby, the right spelling is in there. The next day, I received Ruby's completed puzzle. There sure were a lot of eraser marks.

I'm not sure what the point of making the puzzles difficult was. I'm prone to condemn my eleven-year-old self for trying so hard to trip up my classmates. It was a sort of meanness, perhaps a way of trying to assert word search superiority. In the end, it was just me, a kid who didn't have trouble with schoolwork, showing that she didn't understand that some kids did.

And so, for the sake of Ruby and whatever other kids had to finish one of my word searches, I would like to make a confession: in writing this, I had to look up "cornucopia." Go figure.