Lori Duff Writes
When I was a young girl, my grandmother taught me to knit. For many years, all I could knit was rectangles, but you can make a lot of things with rectangles. Scarves, blankets, even hats. My Dad, whenever he saw me knitting, called me “Madame Defarge” after the Charles Dickens character in A Tale of…
I guess because I’m over fifty and algorithms are real, I keep getting suggested links to articles with titles like, “Ten Outfits You Should Never Wear if You’re Over Fifty” or “Makeup Trends to Avoid if You’re Over Fifty” or “Haircuts That Will Just Make You Look Like a Dried-up Hag if You Are North…
I have a business idea that, if I had the energy to build from the ground up, would make me a zillionaire. Get this: Rent-a-Mom. There have been times when I wished I could have called the good ladies at Rent-a-Mom when my kids were sick at college and just needed a good in-person momming…
I went on my annual pilgrimage to the eye doctor earlier today. I’ve had eyeball surgery three times in my life, so the poking and prodding they do for a normal exam is no big deal to me. The big deal is picking out glasses. This is a big, colossal deal, and I’m expected to…
I was having lunch with my husband in a semi-fancy restaurant when I had an epiphany. Y’all, I am a freaking magician. I can turn a lightly grilled piece of cow haunch into human thigh fat without any apparent effort. It’s a good thing we don’t have to know how our bodies do these things. …
I went to visit my son a few weeks ago in Houston, home of the World’s Worst Highway System.[1] It was a busy, whirlwind trip, and one of the things we did was go to the Texas Renaissance Festival. Among other things, the Texas Renaissance Festival bills itself as the world’s largest Renaissance Festival because,…
When my kids were little, I made sure they knew there was a difference between tattling and telling. Tattling was bad. Tattling was telling on someone for the sole purpose of getting that person in trouble. It wasn’t making the world safer or more orderly or preventing a theft. Telling, on the other hand, could…
I remember being a little kid and being stuck at the grownup’s table. We might have been at a restaurant or at someone else’s house, but somewhere where retreating to my own space wasn’t an option. I remember wanting to feel included in this grownup world, wishing I had something to contribute to the conversation,…
My daughter is a freshman at college. She is 800 miles away from home in a completely different type of environment. She has gone from the semi-rural south to metropolitan Philadelphia, from the buckle of the Bible belt to a liberal women’s college. It’s good for her, I think, to see that the world is…
The other day, comedienne Leighann Lord tweeted out the following oh-so-profound statement: “I’m no longer interested in productivity being the measure of my humanity.”[1] That struck me like a lightning bolt, and I thought, Yeah. I am more than the sum total of my output. I waste so much mental energy judging my days (and…