In a decade or two, we might be hearing this conversation: You know, fat oysters like that one you’re eating used to be hunted in the wild, like the buffalo. Really? Like cowboys, Chesapeake watermen rode out on low-rise boats, even in the worst weather in the middle of winter, and scraped oysters from the bottom of Chesapeake Bay.

It’s downright terrifying how much control we give away on Election Day. Scarier still is how few of us bother with these decisions.  What we’re really doing when we go out to vote is hiring people for a job with vast responsibility over our public and private lives.

A holiday is always welcome, no matter when it falls. But many of them seem to fall as randomly as the leaves that will soon illustrate for us the meaning of deciduous.

The animals in our lives can get us in trouble. There’s a story circulating through the Bay Weekly office, and possible beyond, about Nipper’s appearance at a family picnic. It wasn’t Nipper’s family picnic.

On Tuesday, August 24, school resumes in both Anne Arundel and Calvert counties, and it’s back to work for not only those tens of thousands of students but also for principals, teachers, counselors, librarians, cafeteria workers, custodians and school bus drivers.

I’m writing these words on a screen, and it’s more likely than ever that’s where you’ll be reading them. Not that newspaper readers have abandoned print pages in their run to e-journalism. Millions are still print readers: 385 million people buy a newspaper each week, meaning we print-makers have, conservatively, one billion weekly readers. Count me among them.

Wonders happen in water. Capture water in a pool, and creatures can’t resist it. We gather in the liquid, and make magic. Here’s what I mean. Consider that the narrator and title character in the novel Life of Pi, named Piscine for swimming pool in French, devotes pages to second-hand elegies to the early 20th century swimming pools of Paris — despite sanitation far beneath the standards of modern pools. Consider that the Druid Hill and Patterson Park swimming pools of Baltimore have inspired the Fluid Movement performance troupe to nine years of water ballet.

As Bay Weekly — which is also the name of the Albin 28 in which husband Bill Lambrecht and I fish and cruise — passed under the Choptank River Bridge and through the extended arms of the Bill Burton Fishing Piers, we saluted the Old Man of the Bay. But salty stories in his honor were interrupted by the shriek of an engine alarm. A clogged fuel filter sent us back to Cambridge. 

  Bill Burton wanted a windmill in his backyard. Not as decoration, and certainly not to chase away birds, for Bill was their dedicated friend. No, he wanted windmills because he believed our future depends on them as one no-longer optional choice we must make to save our planet.