Lori Duff Writes
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…
Colleen and Violet were my Angels. Not the scary fire-and-brimstone kind, but the guardian kind who bring goodness and light and help and possibly a nice snack. My mother was in in-home hospice at the end of a long journey with lung cancer. (I hate cigarettes. I mean, I really hate cigarettes. Not smokers, mind…
“The Meat and Potatoes of Life: My True Lit Com” is the story of Lisa Smith Molinari. Molinari could have had a career as a successful litigator in a big law firm and made a ton of money. She had the education and the skill set and the job and the drive and everything it…
My friend sent me, via text message, this picture of her mother’s cat: Something about this cat picture, sent to me two weeks into house arrest via coronapocalypse, spoke to a place deep inside me. I felt this cat. This cat knew something important about the universe. I wanted this cat to replace the bald…
“Good Grammar is the Life of the Party: Tips for a Wildly Successful Life” by Curtis Honeycutt is an irreverent, fun collection of essays written by a self-described Word Nerd. Honeycutt makes grammar fun and relevant by sticking to his theme: if you want to be taken seriously, you have to sound like you want…