Lori Duff Writes
For my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, as well as a milestone birthday for my husband that happens in the same year, I want to go to Italy and eat my way from one end to the other. I want to have first-hand opinions on the wine, bread, and pasta; northern vs. southern cuisine. I want to…
I’m an empty nester, but not all the way empty. My children still come home often enough that there’s cause to keep their bedrooms available for them. My daughter was home most of this past summer, and my son came home for what felt like fifteen minutes. My husband is home all the time. And…
I have a writing friend who, in addition to other things, is obviously highly intelligent and insightful. She mentioned, at the last collective of writers[1] that she was working on a romance book. She said this with her head hung, obviously embarrassed by her non-lofty choice of topics. This led to a vigorous discussion about…
I have a cross-stitched rendering of the Serenity Prayer on my wall in my office. The Serenity Prayer, in case you don’t know goes like this: God grant me: The Serenity to accept the things I cannot change The Strength to change the things I can, and The Wisdom to know the difference. As prayers…
We’re gonna have to do something about the pace at which time is whipping by. I’ve got, by my estimate, about 178 years’ worth of things left on my to-do list and, if you can believe actuaries, only about thirty years left in which to get them done. Which makes me think that I need…
When my mother was in hospice care, she craved those little bitty ice cream cones with a baby scoop of ice cream and a hard chocolate coating like these. She had gone through years of suffering with lung cancer that eventually spread to her brain and, dangit, she’d earned her right to an ice cream…
For the life of me, I will never understand why people prefer to be sitting in traffic, sucking down carbon monoxide from the tailpipe of the car in front of them, to public transportation. Recently, I had to drive from my home in suburban Atlanta to Philadelphia to pick up my daughter from school. It…
Like 98% of the English speaking world, I have been playing Wordle. Wordle, in case you are one of the 2%, or in the event that you are reading this so far in the future that Wordle has faded into obscurity, like pet rocks or sea monkeys, is an online word game, now owned by…
Okay, people. It’s 2023, not 2019. I would have been much more patient and understanding four years ago. But here we are, having had over three years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and we should be further along. Please. Let’s just start the Zoom already. In 2019, virtual meetings were something that only…
‘Stress’ is, I guess, a relative term. I feel like I have a pretty stressful life, with a high pressure job, a house and kids to take care of. But, I also don’t worry about where my next meal is coming from or if a tiger is going to stalk out of the jungle and…