“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do.
I’m half-crazy over the love of you.
It won’t be a stylish marriage. I can’t afford a carriage.
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.

“Harry, Harry, this is my answer true:
I’m not crazy over the love of you.
If it can’t be a stylish marriage, and we can’t afford a carriage,
Then I’ll be danged if I’ll be hanged on a bicycle built for two.”

This is the version of the popular song I learned as a child. The tune is catchy, and for a while I sang it every chance I got. Slowly, though, I started thinking that the eponymous Daisy Bell was unpleasantly superficial in spurning the love in favor of material goods. (Lately I have learned that the answer portion was not part of the original and that there are many variations of Daisy’s answer, some of which find her joyful accepting Harry’s ride.) In any case, as happens with fads, I stopped singing the song but it has never left my consciousness all together. This morning, I awoke thinking that maybe Daisy showed uncommon self-awareness in her answer, making a wise choice for herself and the young man.

Imagine a recent afternoon in New York’s Central Park. Suppose Harrison drops to one knee and says, “Marguerite, I love you. You dazzle me with your brilliant mind and well cut suits. Be mine forever! Come live with me in the country. Give up your oncology practice. We’ll be so happy on my organic farm, and you’ll look so sweet in a pair of bib overalls.”

Put’s a different twist on it, doesn’t it? Could two people with dreams of such different lifestyles ever be happy together? I think not.

Style is an enormously vibrant word. Our style expresses not only who we are but who we want to become, our deepest dreams. Literally, style is a form of emotional bravery, of wearing our hearts on our sleeves.

Style is one way to resolve the ontological paradoxical imperative simultaneously to be and to become. Substance and style are closely related in our minds. Think about it: no one wants a big red shiny apple that tastes of wax outside and is mealy inside, an apple that has traded degraded nutritional content for a toxic stew of herbicides and pesticides.  It’s true that shiny surfaces can be designed to deceive, and we’ve all made Snow White’s mistake of being drawn to the surface without checking under the hood. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean that your beautiful bowl of signature minestrone soup, gleaming with fresh organic vegetables and your homemade pesto, garnished with a little Italian parsley and sprinkled with a few pine nuts, isn’t superior in every way to canned soup. Any canned soup, no matter how meticulously sourced or documented its nutrients. That’s because your soup is your own, sublime, never-to-be-repeated magic worked on local ingredients and served with love. If you serve that soup with imagination and flair – in  pretty china bowls with  silver spoons and cloth napkins, perhaps a candle on the table and a welcoming smile, you’ll have created a meal that will ignite cheers and nourish the dreams of others. You will have been true to yourself and shared yourself with others.

The truth is that we need the organic farm and the city sophistication to be married. We don’t want either/or dichotomies but a synthesis. Sometimes, whether we are talking about personal style or lifestyle shared with others, that happy marriage can be hard to achieve. Like ambitions, personal style should evolve but should never be sacrificed.  Style is the essence of substance, the outer expression of inner qualities and ideas. Like architecture, we develop our style and then it helps us to develop in the direction of our dreams.

I believe that there is a strong correlation between one’s style and one’s authenticity. So, my advice is not to shy away from your style. Embrace it, and follow where it leads…even if that means today you are following a different drummer, peddling down a quiet road on a bicycle built for one. That’s okay. The crowd will catch up. Meanwhile, enjoy the view.

HomeschoolLiterature.com has just done an interview with the illustrator of The Howling Vowels, Heather Newman. It was fascinating for me to learn about her artistic process for the cover. I am so happy with the way she has brought the characters to life. Take a look at her website to see more of her work.

It’s true that how we see ourselves is partly a reflection of how others regard us. This truth takes so many forms, and we each have our own “aha!” moments to illustrate it. One form that interests me is how we can sometimes be braver in defense of another person—even a stranger—than we can be for ourselves.

Two years ago, the father of my daughter’s good friend, was on his way to work when he saw a vehicle in the ditch, smoke roiling from the engine. Without pausing to think, he stopped, saw that the driver was unconscious, saw that there wasn’t time to wait for professionals, freed the driver from his seatbelt, and pulled him to safety. Before police or ambulance could arrive, the smoking vehicle exploded. Our friend and the man he rescued, though, were safe.

Stories like this make me wonder about my own fluctuating level of courage and help me see opportunities for new — albeit less dramatic — ways to stare down fear. Some years ago, as a fledgling homeschooling parent, I felt a lot of fear. I worried that I’d be misunderstood or, worse, that I would somehow fail at the most important thing I had ever undertaken, overseeing the academic education of my child. But I knew that, for her, at that time, homeschooling was what she needed, so I plunged in. It was the stories of other parents, their generosity in sharing their hopes and fears, philosophies and curricula, triumphs and disasters that helped me see how creative and, well, doable (and
fun!) homeschooling can be.

These days, I rarely feel that I will crash. Sometimes, I even feel that the homeschooling venture is cruising along just fine. I am propelled forward by results, not just in academic accomplishments but in the healthy growth I see in my daughter (and in myself). And stories are the fuel.

The town of Sundog, Minnesota doesn’t exist. Or does it? I imagined it, set The Howling Vowels there, and wove the geography of my real home town into the fictional place. I did this because I wanted to be certain to be able to keep things straight as characters come and go through the town streets. I even took photographs of actual houses where I wanted my characters to reside, and used a map of my town to place the homes of the characters and primary public spaces.

It was fun to reshuffle the architecture and residents this way. If you look in the front of the book, you’ll see that the illustrator, Heather Newman, created a map with tiny, accurate drawings of each important site in the story. But something else is getting reshuffled, at least for my daughter and me: we’re starting to see glimpses of Sundog as we walk along the streets of Northfield. There is no cherry tree in front of our house (the model for the home of the Stephens family) but sometimes I seem to see our grand old walnut fold up, telescope-style, and festoon itself with gleaming red fruit.

Now that Julia and I are working on the second book, we are both alert to the lay of land for how it can be used to tell more adventures of the Howling Vowels. We see the stables on the other side of campus, for example, where in actuality there are acres of wild Arboretum. Sometimes, we even think we hear the horses whinnying. And there is that ruin of an old barn, deep in another corner of the Arb…

So maybe, at least part of the time, I actually do live in Sundog.