We celebrate this Father’s Day with an Everyman story. We like such stories. Whether the narrators are Everyman, Everywoman or Everychild, they show us so many faces of our shared human nature. Usually, we find out how much we have in common across our differences. Everychild, for example, wrote our Mother’s Day feature story, with Mrs. Smith’s second graders at Arnold Elementary School writing and illustrating the good deeds of their mothers. Read that story, and you...

Marylanders are planting oysters as if they can save the species by their effort alone. Perhaps they can. The Severn River is among a dozen waterways where Marylanders Grow Oysters, joining in a state program supported by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and the Oyster Recovery Partnership.   To rebuild oyster reefs in the Severn, more than 250 volunteers have tended 1,100 cages of spat suspended from docks along the river. Oysters were raised at private and community docks...

  -Horseshoe crabs, one of the Bay’s links to prehistory, hear the call of summer’s new and full moon and crawl out of the water to mate. They arrive at high tide, when the greenish clumps of eggs deposited by the female are farthest from the churning waves. This is not a sight for the puritanical; the ancient creatures are polygamous, with as many males as possible clinging to a larger, fertile female. The male fertilizes the eggs as they are dug into the sand. Her golf-ball...

  The National World War II Memorial — epically situated in the memorial heart of our capital city, on the National Mall between the Lincoln Memorial to the west and the Washington Monument to the east — looks like it will be around for a long time.  It’s solid as a rock, built of granite and brass. It’s as basic as the elements, water and sky, that join with manmade structures in defining its reach. But the animating force of this great plaza survives now in...