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. In my neighborhood, which is full of new construction, it is one of the older homes.

I live in the south, where there is a lot of new construction in between old, beautiful antebellum homes with some pretty controversial history.

My kids, when they flew the nest, they flew the nest, flapping their wings and catching air currents to different climates. My daughter now lives in the Philadelphia area where one of her friends lives in the house where Lafayette lived. Three-hundred-year-old historical homes like that are so plentiful in the Philadelphia area that the Marquis de Lafayette’s[1] former digs have been divided up into apartments for college students and no one thinks twice about it.

My son lives in New Haven[2], and history there exists in every sidewalk paver. But still, I am aware that the history that impresses my son for being so old—four hundred years or more sometimes—is still only four hundred years old.[3]

In my recent trip to Europe, I got a new feeling about what was truly old. By the time we got halfway through, whenever a tour guide showed me something, say, Napoleonic, I thought, “Why are you showing me this modern nonsense?” and then I’d catch myself and laugh. Normally, something from 1800 or so would strike me as historic.  It didn’t take me long to shift my concept of old.

I loved how incorporated all that old stuff was into modern life.

This beautiful old church was in Florence:

I stood there, awestruck by the gorgeous attention to detail, turned to the left, and took this picture:

Yup. Pizza, a Claire’s, and a tobacco shop.

This picture summed up Croatia for me:

A thousand-plus year-old building housing a soccer ad with graffiti. Plus random American tourists.

I don’t think I’ll be complaining about my 25-year-old oven anymore.

[1] Played by Daveed Diggs on Broadway, if that fact alone doesn’t impress you.

[2] Yes, this is code for “he goes to Yale” and is my fake humble-braggy way of touting my parental success.

[3] Yes, I am aware that I’m only talking about white people history. Indigenous people have been here for thousands of years, but when we showed up here we destroyed what they had built and it simply isn’t here to see anymore. It’s shameful, but it’s a fact.

Buy my book, Devil’s Defense, or the audiobook, and/or find me on Substack.

Lori Duff

Lori B. Duff is an award-winning author who practices law on the side.  Her latest book, “If You Did What I Asked in the First Place” was awarded the Gold Medal for humor in the Foreword INDIES awards in 2019. You can follow her on Twitter at @LoriBDuff and on Facebook. For more blogs written by Lori, click here. For more information about Lori in general, click here. If you want Lori to do your writing for you, click here. If you want Lori to help you market your book, click here.