After 13 settled years, my husband joined the Foreign Service. We packed up our kids and our pets, sold the house and started a life of moving. In 25 years, we traveled to nine posts: the Congo (then called Zaire, which none of our friends had heard of), Morocco, Washington, Paris, back to Washington, Geneva, Moscow, London and finally New York. In five of these postings — Morocco, Washington, Geneva, Moscow and London — I worked as the community liaison officer. One of the...

Back in the woods, off a winding country road in Davidsonville, a bunch of happy people are cutting the rug in the former mess hall of a decommissioned Nike missile base.     It’s good times as usual with the Davidsonville Dance Club, which hosts weekly Saturday night dances, evening lessons during the week and occasional weekend workshops. Founded in 1980, the club’s membership is about 250, equally balanced between men and women.     This Saturday...

The chirping call of spring peepers, Pseudacris crucifer, is my favorite sound of spring. Perhaps it was my upbringing in swampy Louisiana that draws me to frog songs. I often find myself rolling down the windows as I drive home along Muddy Creek Road in southern Anne Arundel County to catch a wave of springtime from the marshes and wetlands along the road.     The chorus of these tiny frogs is one of our first harbingers of warmer temperatures and longer days. You’ll hear...

This is our lucky week. Allen Delaney is back in fine form.     If you’re a recent Bay Weekly reader, you may not know what you’ve been missing. Delaney’s recent contributions have been brief, semi-serious dispatches. But in his Bay Weekly heyday — 2002 to 2009 — he could make his readers fall from their chairs and burst into tears — all the results of the felonious assault of laughter.     Delaney’s comic alter-ego was a...