Twelve-year-old Colton Clayton caught a Maryland record largemouth bass while fishing at a farm pond in his hometown of Huntingtown, in Calvert County, on July 31. The fish was 11 pounds, 6 ounces, 26 inches long and 18 inches around. Clayton caught the fish using a spinning rod loaded with eight-pound test line and a plastic worm, rigged weedless and without a weight.

Versatility is a life preserver through changing times, and these are changing times.     For Labor Day’s Back to Work feature this year, we wanted to explore how citizens of Chesapeake Country were riding the waves.     So we set out in search of career changers.     That choice meant we’d be talking to people who’d been in the water for a while; thus people of a certain age. Our sample brought us ages from 42, Jared Littmann, to 75, Jim Lyles.

What ingredients does it take to make a valuable volunteer for cats waiting for their forever home?     Cullen Hunter, 19, and his grandfather Robert Sigona — both of Dunkirk — know firsthand how to help out the hundreds of furry paws at Calvert Animal Welfare League.     Hunter started volunteering to earn his required 75 service hours at Huntingtown High School. He graduated last year but stayed on at CAWL, logging in hundreds of hours keeping cats company.

You remember those days, the excitement — or terror — a new school year brings, mixed with the sorrow of letting go of summer.     It’s a story each of us shares and each generation repeats. Yet each person’s story enriches the theme with delicious detail.     As the 2013 school year begins, we’ve asked 12 kids (and one surprise returnee) — kindergarten through 12th grade — for their views.

Marion Keenly Carr, my mother, died on July 30, 2013.     She lived a classy life. And she died a classy death.     She was a link to the old America, but she was surprisingly aware, even hip.     Ronnie was an elegant woman — perfect hair, nice earrings, beautiful clothes, lipstick and makeup — with a sharp mind and a keen sense of humor who had more friends than anyone I know.

Going down John Dawson’s street in Severna Park, you can’t miss the rain garden he’s planted in his front yard — and that’s exactly how he wants it.

Three days in the intensive care unit delayed Amanda Fiedler’s meeting with her third child. Finally her husband wheeled her through the halls of Anne Arundel Medical Center to meet Zachary in the neonatal intensive care unit.     “The nurses took the little blanket off the incubator, and he looked so tiny,” says Fielder, tears welling up. “I remember holding him and whispering in his ear, we did it.”

    How hot are you?     Sweltering, sweating, suffering and swearing. That’s Chesapeake summer in the year 2013.     How do you endure it?     As the heat index rose, we had a burning need to find answers to that question. Bay Weekly reporters posed the question to neighbors who, for one reason or another, have had to learn to beat the heat.     We met some hot people and learned some cool tricks.

Bradley Gottfried first stepped onto the Gettysburg battlefield about the time of its 1963 centennial. His 13-year-old self “had a strong interest in the war,” Gottfried says. “But I couldn’t visualize what happened there.”     He spent much of the next half century trying to picture that history.