Crossword Puzzles And Fabric Softener
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
There are things we keep
without knowing we are keeping them
for the last time.
A newspaper folded into quarters.
A crossword, half-completed,
its little rooms of black and white
occupied by the certainty of ink.
Some answers came easily.
Others waited,
their empty squares holding space
for what might yet be known.
It was a good visit.
The sort that does not announce itself
as something worth remembering.
There was washing on the line,
the familiar occupation of afternoons,
and someone at the table
certain he knew a seven-letter word
for almost everything.
Nobody thought to finish the puzzle.
There would be another morning,
another paper,
another opportunity
to find the missing letters.
And then there wasn't.
Years later,
there is still a crossword
with its small, unanswered questions,
the handwriting leaning into each square
as though its owner
has only stepped away
to put the kettle on.
How strange,
the things that outlive us.
Not the arguments
we were so determined to win,
nor the great declarations
we thought would make us understood,
but a scrap of newsprint
that someone could not bear to throw away.
And elsewhere in another house of memory,
there is a washing machine.
A beautiful machine,
or so its owner insisted,
with a thousand small instructions
for keeping it that way.
No fabric softener.
Absolutely none.
There were reasons,
of course.
There are always reasons
for the rules we make
around the things we fear to lose.
But once,
for someone who had travelled
halfway around the world,
the rule was quietly set aside.
A capful of something fragrant
poured into its little drawer.
No ceremony.
No explanation.
Only the astonishing tenderness
of being permitted
what the rest of the world
was not.
Perhaps love is like that.
Not always a grand arrival,
not always the right words
spoken at the right time.
Sometimes it is a man
making room for softness
in a machine
he has spent so long protecting.
Sometimes it is the space
left open in a crossword,
because there was never any reason
to believe the person holding the pen
would not come back.
And sometimes,
when all the years have gathered
between what was said
and what was meant,
we find ourselves
holding the smallest evidence.
A page gone yellow.
A familiar hand.
The ghost of clean laundry
rising from a drawer.
We learn that love
does not always arrive complete.
That some of its meanings
are discovered only afterward,
when there is no one left
to ask if we have understood.
And that grief
is not always the absence
of an answer.
Sometimes it is knowing
there was love,
and having nowhere left
to put it.
Except into the things
we cannot bring ourselves
to throw away.
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Poetry by Britt Wolfe:
I wrote Crossword Puzzles and Fabric Softener in memory of my dad, who passed away on his 80th birthday. It's about the quiet, ordinary ways love reveals itself, often in moments we don't recognize as extraordinary until years later. It's about the things we keep without knowing why, the small exceptions someone makes just for us, and the questions that remain when a relationship ends before we've found all the answers. Above all, it's about understanding that love can be imperfect, complicated, and sometimes difficult to recognize, but no less real for having existed in the spaces between what was said and what was left unsaid. 💚