Lori Duff Writes
My house is twenty-six years old. We were the first owners of the house, so we remember it when it smelled like fresh-cut wood and paint. It’s no longer shiny and new. It’s dusty and cluttered, the paint is peeling, and the appliances have mostly been replaced piecemeal, so they don’t match. It looks dated.…
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” ― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It I recently returned from a two-week…
Phyllis. I think her name would be Phyllis. Phyllis is a strong, sturdy, no-nonsense name. Phyllis gets things done. Phyllis is where she is supposed to be when she is supposed to be there. Phyllis does what she says she is going to do without delay. Now that I’m in my mid-fifties, I no longer…
My husband and I recently celebrated our twenty-sixth wedding anniversary. That’s a long time. It’s not half my life, but it’s darn close. I’m aware of the age of the Earth, though it’s hard for me to conceptualize that many years. It’s really hard for me to conceptualize the Earth existing longer than I have…
According to that pop psychology book I haven’t read, the five love languages are Allegedly what that means is that different people give and receive love in different ways. If someone isn’t ‘speaking’ love to you in the way you want to hear it, you might not receive the message. Some people aren’t big…
I’ve always been a rules girl. A law and order girl[1], if you will. I believe deep in my heart that the only thing standing between us and complete anarchy is the societal agreement that we’ll all obey a set of basic rules. In theory, the American set-up is brilliant. The checks and balances of…
For a while, when I was a teenager, I was obsessed with the idea of color. I got it into my head that there was no way to know if we all perceived color the same way, that maybe the way I saw green was the way you saw orange, and that would explain why…
I’m being bullied by marketing departments. I know that’s what it is. I know it’s not actually the critters they send with over-large eyes and disapproving expressions, but I’m unusually susceptible to such things. Guilt is one of the languages I’m fluent in. I want to go to Italy. I want to start at one…
Let me introduce you to my new favorite social activity: the Silent Book Club. It’s such an amazing concept for us introverts, the ones who aren’t anti-social, but who prefer parallel play to yapping and quiet to noise. Here’s the concept. Like minded people get together in a coffee shop or similar place. We spend…
Back a thousand years ago when I had small, adorable children I managed to send out holiday cards. I used templates to stick in pictures of the Dufflets, the world’s most adorable children, and a saved list of holiday address labels to stick on the front of envelopes. Then, people moved and the address labels…