Lori Duff Writes
I went to sixth grade orientation last week. My actual sixth grader didn’t go and wasn’t oriented because she was still at camp. I admit that I did a pretty poor job of orienting myself, under the theory that I am not going to have to be able to find the classes, nor will I be able…
My Mom is not that old, considering how old I am and how old her grandchildren are. I won’t tell you how old she is, for fear that she reads this and cuts me out of the will, but suffice it to say that it has not yet been a decade since she threw herself…
I’ve had a longstanding rule at my lake house. The house, located in the muddy armpit of Lake Oconee, is designed to be an oasis. Nothing stressful is supposed to happen there. We have no television access, so you can’t watch the news to find out who was brutally murdered or who was maimed in…
There are two basic ways in which brains are wired in the Duff household. One way is the way my son and I think of the universe. Jacob and I? We like the box. We find the walls of the box comforting. We like rules and lists and limits and structure. There are plenty of…
Recently, my family took a road trip to visit my parents in Ft. Myers, Florida. We’ve taken this trip many times. It is about six hundred miles, door to door, mostly on long, boring stretches of I-75, with not much to look at but billboards offering vasectomies, strippers, religious salvation, and outlet malls. There are plenty…
My mother’s mother’s sister, Aunt Pearl, had an old guitar that used to belong to her son, Jeffrey, that she wanted to give my daughter. Aunt Pearl, an admirably independent nonagenarian, lives alone in a two story house near the beach in New York, and, if you had to pick a celebrity she resembled the…
One of the great joys of being a parent is the chance to drive to East Bumblefudge on your weekend to watch your children participate in whatever sporting/academic/competitive event is going on that Saturday. This past weekend my daughter had an archery tournament in a location a little over two hours from our home. We were…
Decades after the test, how would you do taking SAT Practice Questions? My son took the SAT the other day. He’s only in Seventh Grade, but he took it for the Duke Talent Identification Program. His theory? I’m only in Seventh Grade. I’m not going to study. I want to just see how I do.…
I tried to slip one of my daughter’s teachers a twenty dollar bill the other day, but she wouldn’t take it. I think she just felt hinky taking unexpected cash money from me, though my guess is if I had handed her a $20 gift card to an office supply store she’d have taken it.…
Last week, I wrote about chaperoning a middle school band festival and finding ourselves in the kind of hotel you’d expect to see chalk outlines in. Click here to read the beginning of the story. I stood in the middle of the room, unsure of what to do. The girls had plopped themselves on the…