Getting the feel of his first pair of shoes five days into a walk across America to raise money and awareness for at-risk youth, Frank Chiarelli passed through Annapolis on May 6.     “It feels like I’ve been doing this for months. That’s how my body feels,” he said of his walk to the Pacific Ocean begun May 1 in the Cape May/Lewes area.     “I have an app,” he says, “that calculates how many steps I’ll walk in each...

Sarah Petska says every year that it’s her last. And every year her friends remind her that she said that the year before. Yet here she is again, prepping hard for the 16th Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival.     “I literally work up until the Monday after the festival, when the stages are finally gone. I guess I must really love it because I keep coming back.”     Petska was there from the beginning, when her father Don Hooker hosted the first...

Among the many gifts I received as a young girl was one no one else had. The book was small, to fit a young girl’s grasp. Heavily coated white paper held an illustration of a girl being tucked in by her mother. Aloft, like a guardian angel, was a hazy drawing of a second woman, benignly observing the scene below. The title said it all: The Girl with Two Mothers.     I was just like that girl.     “When we married we were going to have four or five...

My youngest daughter, Alyson, recently graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in politics and government and a part-time job with a non-profit in D.C. — plus hopes and plans for changing the world. How had this happened, I wondered, how had time tracked me down and pushed me along, insisting that I move it, move it, ready or not?     As the mother of six, there were times I daydreamed about an empty nest. I was guilty of wishing time along, dreaming about...