After the long pandemic shutdown, this weekend promises to help open hearts and minds to future possibilities and, at the same time, to reflect on past history and injustices in our nation.

The chop-chop-a-chop-a of skyway helicopter noise is a familiar conversation pauser in our neighborhoods. We hear it in my neck of East Falls Church, and it prompts fear of some crisis afoot.

This week’s edition of the News-Press includes a retrospective commentary by our friend and erstwhile contributor Robbie Barnett in which he describes his first venture at age 20 into a gay bar in Norfolk.

For 29 years, the Falls Church Village Preservation and Improvement Society (VPIS) has sponsored the annual Summer Concerts in Cherry Hill Park. The first concert of 2021 premiers Thursday, June 17, at 7 p.m.

As this week marks the end of the school year for the Falls Church City Public Schools (FCCPS), it will be remembered as probably the most challenging and exhausting in the system’s history.

It was a bad week for cyclists and pedestrians in Fairfax County; in fact, it’s been a bad year for them.

“Arlington House is Closed,” read the National Park Service sign for the past three years. No longer.

For those of us immersed and enmeshed in the primary campaigns, the world around us became more and more distant. Today I say, welcome back primary campaign workers and candidates. The world is waiting for you to jump back in.

Hatred has many synonyms — abhorrence, revulsion, disgust, loathing — and they all apply to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s horrid comments last week, equating masks and vaccines that battle the Covid-19 pandemic to Hitler’s treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.

This year, “June,” as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s song from the Broadway classic “Carousel” exclaims, indeed “is busting out all over.”