Tuesdays with Mary

Tuesday, December 2, 2025 If you’ve been following our Excess Equity Watch series in The Legal Description, you know this area of law continues to shift under our feet. Ever since the Supreme Court’s 2023 Tyler v. Hennepin County decision, states have been revising (or at least reconsidering) how they should handle surplus equity after tax foreclosures. And now another significant case is headed to SCOTUS, with fresh implications for property rights and state processes. Pacific Legal Foundation has joined Pung v. Isabella County, a case the Supreme Court will hear this term. PLF is the same organization who litigated [...]

Tuesday, November 25, 2025 Every year around Thanksgiving, we hear a lot about gratitude.  Big, sweeping gratitude, the kind that belongs in greeting cards or glossy commercials.  I love occasions for big sweeping gratitude.   But most of the real thankfulness in life is built on smaller things. The ordinary things. The things you don’t notice until you’re old enough, or still for long enough, to realize how much they matter.  And how much you rely on them. For me, gratitude shows up in the basics: a warm house when the weather shifts, a familiar recipe that always turns out the [...]

Tuesday, November 18, 2025 Every so often, something comes along that reminds us who we are at our core; and how we got here. Ken Burns’ new documentary, The Revolutionary War, did that for me as Episode 1 aired on Sunday. If you haven’t watched yet, it’s worth your time. Burns has a way of slowing things down just enough for the past to speak directly into the present. A thread you might notice throughout the episode is the coupling of two concepts: Land and Liberty. For the colonists, those two concepts were inseparable. Land wasn’t just a parcel on [...]

Tuesday, November 4, 2025 In Silicon Valley, the motto has long been “Go fast and break things.” In title and settlement, it’s closer to “Go slow and fix things.” We live by different rules, and for good reason. In our world, when something breaks, someone loses a home, a life savings, or their professional reputation. There’s no bailout for a missed lien or a wire sent to the wrong place. No venture capital fund comes to make it right. We don’t get to move fast and hope for the best; the stakes are too high. That’s what creates the infamous [...]

Tuesday, October 27, 2025 The other morning, after the first full freeze of the season, I was out with Shelby and Grace. Shelby, a cattle dog, often locks her gaze on things “out there,” studying, measuring, trying to figure out what’s real and what’s just a shadow. Fall can play tricks on her with its shifting colors, but today she stood utterly still, only her eyes moved as they slowly scanned the plowed field and the thicket of trees behind the house. As Grace and I matched her stillness, I realized what had captured her attention. I heard it: a [...]

Tuesday, October 21, 2025 I didn’t need the books in the ’80s and ‘90s about “if you’re not early, you’re late” or “skate to where the puck is going to be”.  No, that was money I could save because instead I grew up with George Gird.  My father would make somewhat of a show of getting behind the wheel of the car about 15 minutes before our scheduled departure. If you weren’t early, you were left behind. “On time” was actually late. That was the rule — no reminders, no courtesy honks, no second chances. It turned out to be [...]

Tuesday, October 14, 2025 Did you see that 60 Minutes story about the tequila heist? It caught my attention partly because, well, tequila. But mostly because of how the thieves pulled it off. They didn’t break into a warehouse or hijack a truck on the highway. They used fake digital “paperwork”. Fake carrier profiles. Forged tracking data. The trucks looked like they were on their way. The GPS showed them moving down the highway. Only they weren’t. They were going somewhere else entirely. I couldn’t stop thinking about that — because it’s exactly the kind of deceit we deal with [...]

Tuesday, October 7, 2025 I’ve always admired women who build something of their own from the ground up. Bobbi Brown is one of those women. She started as a makeup artist in New York City in the 1980s, long before the natural look was trendy. From her house in Montclair, New Jersey, she sold her own line of lipsticks, and eventually built a global brand that reshaped the beauty industry. If for some reason you aren't familiar, Bobbi sold her original cosmetics company, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, to Estée Lauder in 1995 for a reported $74.5 million. What strikes me most [...]

Tuesday, September 30, 2025 This past weekend, diving across the plains on my way to visit my mom, I passed mile after mile of fields heavy with harvest. Combines cut neat paths, dust hung in the air, and trucks rumbled toward silos. It struck me that harvest isn’t just about gathering crops — it’s about gathering what has grown quietly, almost unnoticed, over time. Reunions feel a little like that too. They aren’t built in a single afternoon. They’re the result of all the small, steady moments that add up: the inside jokes, the phrases repeated so often they become [...]

September 23, 2025 Years ago, I worked with a company whose executive sponsor told me his measure of success for a software conversion was simple: his phone wouldn’t ring with employee complaints. You can guess what happened next. His phone rang…a lot. The project kicked off strong, slowly unraveled, then stalled.  Eventually they backed out of the conversion entirely, retreating back to their old system. It was painful to watch, not because either software wasn’t capable, but because the change wasn’t managed with the right mindset. That experience reinforced something I’ve seen again and again in large and important projects: [...]