The Morgantowner: My Sister, Calvert County and The Millennials.

This should be three posts, but it will be one.

My fiftieth monthly county is Calvert County, Maryland, south of Annapolis between Chesapeake Bay and the Patuxent River estuary. The county is adjacent to Prince Georges County, where my sister Robin has lived since attending the University of Maryland a few decades ago. My plan was to combine trips, as I try to see my sister over the summer.

Robin and I get along well generally. She is careful and meticulous, I am sloppy and more reckless. Since she has lived in her house, I've lived in three different cities and eight different homes. She is the only one who really understands what our parents were like and who remembers our grandparents. We both nap in the afternoon, take medication before we can eat breakfast, and watch our weight.

I try to visit the Garrison Forest Veteran's Cemetery in Owings Mills, where our parents are buried, every year before Rosh Hashana (this year in early October). Robin and I visited in the morning, then had lunch at Suburban House, an old-fashioned Jewish deli in Pikesville, near where we grew up, and a place we hung out in our younger years. The restaurant moved to a new shopping center a few years ago. We asked the waitress where she went to high school. She attended Milford Mill a few years after my sister. The manager (City College '68) came over to chat us up. He wants things to stop changing, and lamented that the 1960s in Jewish Baltimore are gone. There was a tight-knit community that no longer exists. Robin and I both fled for our lives when we had the chance. We thought we saw our parents' friends at the restaurant, but we soon realized the people we saw were our age.

I visited two millennial couples in the Washington area, my nephew Evan and his fiancée Kellie in Arlington, and my friend Neal, who I met here in Morgantown, and his new wife Natasha, in Silver Spring. I've read about how millennials are likely to be urban dwellers, use transit instead of driving, and worry about making a living. Evan and Kellie have a small apartment in a newer building with a fitness center and pool. They share a car, live a block from Arlington's courthouse, take the subway to work and use Uber when they need an extra car.

Neal and Natasha live in an older building, which means their apartment is slightly larger than Evan and Kellie's, but parking is outside the building and there are no amenities. They are near the center of Silver Spring, a location with shops and restaurants and the American Film Institute. The proximity to AFI alone makes me envious. Still, I would be uncomfortable in a cramped apartment like theirs.

Both couples are paying off student loans, and find money tight. I feel their frustration. I lived in central Baltimore in my 20s, had a small student loan from grad school, paid about 20% of my earnings for rent and didn't own a car. I didn't make a lot of money, but I was able to live comfortably on what I had. Young people today can't do that.

I brought a light jacket with me, because I remember that evenings are usually cool in Maryland the last week of August. Apparently, that is no longer true. Temperatures remained well above average the entire time I was there. Perhaps this is the "new normal."

Sunday was my day to visit Calvert County. Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington becomes State Road 4 in Maryland. It is joined by State Road 2 heading south from Baltimore and Annapolis. SR 2-4 is the main road in Calvert County.

I have a college friend who grew up in Calvert when it was a sleepy agricultural area. There are towns that were destroyed by the British in the War of 1812, and for a long time, Calvert County did not seem to recover, as Baltimore and Washington became major cities. Recently, the northern part of the county has become an expensive suburb, with faux colonial mansions on acres and half-acres. To the credit of the county, they have limited commercial development to "town centres" near Prince Frederick, the county seat, Huntingtown near the center of the county, Solomons, at the south end of the county, and a few other locations. The stores were the usual grocery stores, pharmacy chains, and mattress shops.

I picked ten of the twenty places listed on the National Register to visit. Some were houses from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I used to drive up long driveways to catch a glimpse of an old country house, but I'm over that now. I saw some of the houses from a distance and didn't photograph them. I found some old houses near the ones on the National Register. There were also old churches, generally Episcopal. Maryland was founded by Catholics, and was called The Free State, because any Christian was allowed to settle there.

There isn't a lot to Prince Frederick. More interesting were Solomons and Solomons Island, at the southern end of the county and on the waterfront at the Patuxent River estuary just before it flows into Chesapeake Bay. It's a resort area with restaurants and a Tiki bar. It was crowded on a warm sunny Sunday the weekend before Labor Day. The plant life is different in the southern end of the county- more crepe myrtle than the poplars and oaks to the north. There were even palm trees in Solomons Island, much to my surprise. I asked the two young women at The University of Maryland Chesapeake Biological Laboratory at the tip of Solomons Island about the palm trees, and they said they are taken out in winter and replaced in the spring. No, palm trees cannot survive the winter, even in this relatively warm part of Maryland. The laboratory is investigating changes to Chesapeake Bay: stream runoff from mountaintop removal in West Virginia, pollution from agricultural runoff, and how to restore crab and oyster beds. They told me the water is not necessarily higher than in previous times, but it is warmer, and that affects the bay's ecology.

Isaac Solomon was a businessman from Baltimore who opened a cannery for oysters in the mid-19th century. I've looked for something that says he was Jewish, but I couldn't find any written account. I assume he was Jewish.

I hadn't been everywhere i wanted to be when I got to Solomons Island, separated by a barely noticeable creek from the mainland. I decided to take the rest of the day off, walk around and have a chocolate ice cream cone, in the way many men would have a beer. It was about 70 miles back to my sister's house from Solomons Island, with heavy traffic despite it being a late Sunday afternoon. I imagine rush hour is not pretty.

I came back to Morgantown Monday in time for Joe's birthday Tuesday, and had to explain my dark tan to my dermatologist, who has warned me about being out in the sun, Wednesday afternoon.

Here are the pictures:

All Saints' Church, Sunderland, founded in the 1600s. The present building is from 1774

Lower Marlboro ( along the Patuxent River (formerly Marlborough). Called "Lower" because Upper Marlboro is the county seat of Prince Georges County, to the north and west.