When Cynthia McBride was a kid driving a tractor on her family’s Minnesota farm, art was not on her mind or in her future. At her father’s right hand, she watched as he managed the farm, purchased seed and equipment, planned for future crops. The seed of art that flourishes in the largest art gallery in historic Annapolis sprouted with her mother, a painter with a home studio.     Both parents were examples of hard work, honesty and thriftiness. “Nothing got thrown away,” McBride remembers. “Everything was used.”

Summer is swell. During its short stay, we imagine a vista of fun, sun and long vacations. The reality is a little different, with heat, humidity and the necessity of working for a living.     About half of us Americans are in the work force, according to the bureau of Labor Statistics. Come Labor Day, we’re back to the work that gives so many of us a life as well as a living.

The capital city music scene is thriving. Over the last decade, the downtown bar scene and plentiful local venues have bred musicians now flourishing on a larger scale. Reggae rockers Joey Harkum — whose band Pasa­dena honors his home town — and Brandon Hardesty — who inspired Bumpin Uglies — went from strumming on the docks and breaking into open mikes to selling out local venues and touring coast to coast. They’ve headlined festivals like Silopanna and Bay Funk and still play weeknight solo acoustic gigs at downtown Annapolis bars.

On the corner of Ego Alley and City Dock at weekends when the weather is at its best, The Balloon Man pumps and twists latex into masterpieces to tickle kids and tease the stiffness out of adults.     On an average sunny Saturday, Charles Baker makes up to 100 balloons from Elmos to penguins, flowers to swords.     “My grandson thinks he is grandpa,” says a customer. “I am sure it’s the grey hair.” The grandson brandishes an inflated miniature sword just made for him by Baker.

If Kenneth ‘Kenny’ Claro and Ray ‘Ray Ray’ Werwie Jr. had not stepped up to help, Enzo Tannozzini would have been in long-term rehab.     Instead, through a series of happenstances, Tannozzini’s happily back home.     The World War II veteran had fallen and broken his hip. Now he could come home … if their Franklin Manor home had wheelchair access. With little hope and less money, wife Juanita Tannozzini didn’t know what to do.

Skateboarders of all ages are grabbing their decks for a new era of the perennial sport. In Calvert County, 18-year-old Joey Jett and 46-year-old Wayne Cox represent opposite poles in a new skateboarding brotherhood supported by Joe Smialek’s Prince Frederick shop Aggro Joe’s. With hard-driven passion, all three have turned their love for skateboarding into careers. •   •   •

By the time patients come to the Maryland Disc Institute, they are sick and tired of being in pain.     “They’ve been to their primary care provider, a chiropractor or therapist and taken pain killers. Some have had injections without any lasting relief. They do everything else first, and then when that doesn’t stop the pain, they come to me,” says Dr. Kathryn Hodges.

Only one crab can be Queen of the World’s Largest Crab Feast, and it might be the one to be steamed first.     Stifled in a 10-legged felt and Styrofoam crab suit with accompanying long fuzzy pants and sleeves, Lucy Mackinnon risks heat stroke every time she plays the part of Queen Clawdia, as she will for the Rotary Club of Annapolis Crab Feast. To cope with the heat, Mackinnon fills zipper bags with water and alcohol and hangs a battery-powered fan around her neck — inside the suit. But there’s no telling if that will be enough.

Being the Severn Riverkeeper is not so much a job as a roller coaster ride. Having a biologist wife, Nancy, to teach me the science and a good friend, Sarah Caldes, to do the grant writing have made it a fun ride.     My early childhood was all about trying to catch fish in Baltimore’s Lake Roland and the Homeland Lakes and in the Severn River. When I was 10, every spring started with a trip to the Severn for the early spawning runs of its iconic fish, the yellow perch.

On a sunny Saturday morning in late June, in a field overlooking the Patuxent River in Lusby, men assembling two 25- and 30-foot steel towers, section by section. Atop the shorter tower is a contraption that looks like an upside-down umbrella.     What in the world is going on here?