Lori Duff Writes
“Think before you speak.” Is there anyone – anyone? – who will doubt the wisdom of this old saw? I’m going to go with “no.” I mean, “speak before you think” makes no sense. “Go ahead and spout any old garbage before you’ve given it any thought whatsoever” seems like foolish advice. Now that…
I’m more fortunate than a lot of people, I suppose, in that during coronapocalypse my industry, the law, has been considered an essential one and we never really shut down. Things shifted to Zoom and WebEx. We discovered that a lot of those meetings that we suspected could have been emails really could have been…
I happen to have been born in a Jubilee Year. A Jubilee Year is a biblical thing, specifically Leviticus 25:8-13, and although it is a fairly complicated concept, it can be summed up as a Super-Sabbath of a year. It’s the year after the 7th times 7th year. The 50th year. You rest your cropland…
“The Murder of Sara Barton” by Lance McMillian is a courtroom drama told from the perspective of a prosecutor who has a personal motive for wanting to see murderers get their due. Chance Meridian is still grieving the loss of his wife and son to a killer who has gotten away with the crime when…
It was during regular business hours and I was on the phone with someone of some rank, even though it was someone I knew well, and we were discussing Important Business that Mattered. My son flew into my room without knocking and yelled, “There’s a giant snake in the yard.” My son, mind you, is…
If you were to run into me on the street, or in the grocery store, or any of the places it is possible to run into me when we are not in a pandemic and I refuse to leave my house, one of the last things you would think is, “Dang, gurl, you are one…
They say that chickens always come home to roost. Now that the Duff family has chickens, I’ve found this to be literally true. In fact, one day, the coop door blew shut. When dusk came the chickens[1] went to put themselves to bed and could not get in the coop. Granted, chickens are painfully stupid. …
“Maisha and the Rainbow Tree” by Jeffrey Blander and the “Save Our Tree Team” is a children’s book about resilience, hope, and hard work. It was inspired by Blander’s real life 7-year old daughter, Rosie, along with her friends, who started a protest when they discovered that a beloved tree in her neighborhood was going…
For years, my daughter sold Girl Scout cookies. That wasn’t the only reason she was a Girl Scout, but it may have been the only reason I encouraged her to be a Girl Scout. I needed my in-house hook up. Y’all, Girl Scout cookies are GOOD. And maybe they teach girls about marketing and entrepreneurship…
“Carrie’s Quest,” by Pam Sievers is a romance novel, sure, but not your typical impossibly-beautiful-twenty-something-woman meets impossibly-handsome-twenty-something-man with both of them making bad decisions based on misunderstandings along the way romance. It doesn’t rely on heat or lust or sexual chemistry to get you through the day. It is a grown-up romance novel. Carrie is…