Alright, so today I decided to tackle the New York Times crossword. Got myself situated, you know, the usual routine. Grabbed my pen – yeah, I sometimes do it in pen, makes it feel a bit more permanent, a bit riskier maybe.
Getting Started
I started scanning the clues, looking for the easy ones first, the gimmes, to get some letters on the board. Made some decent headway in the top left corner. Then, as always happens, I landed on a clue that made me pause. It was just two words: “came up”. Simple, right? But those short ones can often mean a bunch of different things.
My brain immediately started flipping through possibilities:
- Did something literally rise? Like the sun came up?
- Was a topic mentioned? Like, “your name came up in conversation”?
- Did something happen unexpectedly? “Something urgent came up.”
- Even thought about, like, plants coming up from the ground.
So, yeah, a few paths to consider.
Working Through It
I looked at the grid. It was a five-letter answer, I think. I had a couple of letters already filled in from the crossing words. Let’s see… I think I had an ‘R’ as the second letter and maybe an ‘S’ as the fourth. So, _ R _ S _.
Okay, that helps narrow it down. “ROSE” fits, like the sun. But it could also be past tense, like “arose”. Like, “a problem arose”. That fits the _ R _ S _ pattern too. A-R-O-S-E. That felt pretty good. It covers that meaning of being mentioned or emerging.
Checked the other crossing clues again. Did ‘AROSE’ work with the down words? Yeah, the ‘O’ seemed to fit the word going down through the middle, and the final ‘E’ looked okay too for whatever was crossing it at the end. It felt more likely than just ‘ROSE’.
The Solution
So, I went with it. Wrote in AROSE. Stepped back for a second, reread the clue “came up”, looked at AROSE in the grid. Felt solid. It’s always satisfying when you wrestle with a clue for a bit and then the crossing letters help you pin it down. One more blank space filled.
Just thought I’d share that little moment from today’s puzzle. On to the next clue!
