Tuesdays with Mary

Tuesday, December 30, 2025 When I was a kid, my grandfather had an answer for nearly every question I asked. “Go look it up.” I found this endlessly frustrating. I didn’t want a project. I wanted the answer. Just tell me. But it wasn’t a dismissal; it was an invitation to engage more deeply. Instead, he’d send me to the encyclopedias. I’d flip through the heavy volumes, find what I was looking for, and come back; sometimes satisfied, sometimes more confused than when I started. That’s when he’d ask the real questions: What did you find? What surprised you? What [...]

Tuesday, December 23, 2025 As the year winds down, it’s worth pausing to remember how many homes you helped move from idea to reality this year. How many keys changed hands because of your work. How many people crossed a threshold (their very own threshold!) for the first time.  This season is filled with memories being made in first homes; first holidays in a new space, first memories that will stick with them long past any closing chaos or move-in mania. And just as important, how many lasts happened quietly along the way. Final moves. Final sales after decades in [...]

Tuesday December 16, 2025 How much did your company have to pay to become TRID compliant? In every industry, there are moments when external forces change the cost of doing business. Sometimes those forces arrive with a press release. Sometimes they arrive buried in hundreds of pages of new requirements. Either way, the question for companies is the same: Who absorbs the cost? In lending and closing, we have lived through this before. When major regulatory changes reshaped disclosure, timing, and compliance expectations, technology providers were forced to re-engineer systems, workflows, and safeguards — often on aggressive timelines. And with [...]

Tuesday, December 9, 2026 “Now they tell me?!?!”  That was my first thought when I read about the Federal Trade Commission’s letter to the Texas Supreme Court about the American Bar Association. I didn’t grow up in a town with an ABA accredited law school, and going away to one wasn’t really a viable option for my family. The thought of being able to qualify for the bar through a different pathway — something that feels like a new idea today — makes you pause and realize how much opportunity in professional life has historically depended on geography, resources, and [...]

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 [...]