On my way to Tara Ebersole’s home to talk to her about the adorable children’s books that she and her sister published, I thought about how Tara has that Heart and Ebersole magic. Sure, her name wasn’t always Ebersole (it was Eisenhauer), but true hearts find each other, as did Tara’s and her hubby’s, Del. Eric Ebersole (D-12). Regular readers of this site know Eric is a rocoinhoco fave–and so is Tara!

Sometimes you don’t realize how much you’ve missed someone until you see them. And so it was for me when Tara opened the door, her dark hair framing her smiling face. She said, “Come in, Robert!” Wait–is that you, Eric!?! There was our good ol’ Eric smiling that big heart-of-gold smile. We caught up for a bit, and Eric told me about this bumner: Maryland General Assembly districts were redrawn in such a way that Eric won’t be on Team 12 representing HoCo-ans anymore. He seemed pretty sad about it.

“Eric, no matter where you go or what happens, you are a part of Howard County. You’ve done so much for it! And it loves you–we love you,” I told him. He seemed buoyed by this and trotted off to make me a cup of tea.

Tara and I went into the family room and sat down at a round table made of dark wood.

I asked Tara if she and her sister, Rachel had based the books on experiences they’d had as children. She said that, yes, the books were based on things that actually happened.

An Idea Is Born

“Rachel used to tell her children these stories at night to help them go to sleep and it was sort of a way to keep us all a part of each other’s lives and connected,” They loved them, and as kids do, demanded to hear them over and over. Rachel knew she was onto something.  Then, Tara said, “She recorded herself telling them and transcribed them.”

The Sisters Ebersole sent them off to publishers in 2005.

“Nothing happened. So she asked me if I’d illustrate them,” Tara continued.

Tara had started out college as an art major, but her parents insisted she study something with more earning power. As she’d already taken and loved anatomy and physiology classes to learn to draw the human body, she became a Biology major. And she loved it. She spent 6 years as a science educator here in Howard County Public Schools.

“I have no regrets at all,” Tara said.

Related: See what Brooke Lierman told us about her bid for Comptroller.

She was delighted at the thought of illustrating these books her sister had written. She wanted the drawings to evoke children’s watercolors and be almost cartoon-like. And because Tara gave me four copies of the total of eight books, I can tell you they are!

Tara used the loft at the Ebersole’s beach house as a studio. It became a sort of joyous escape for her. In general, working with her sister was a joy too. “We haven’t had a single argument about it!” she said.

“What’s the deal with these people?” I joked to myself. When most people work with their own family there are fights and fallouts. It’s like a law of the universe. Tara, I reminded myself, is not “most people”.

“I had a ball,” she said of working on the illustrations, nodding. She said she’d go up to the loft/art studio, “…and I really would lose the problems of the world.

The sisters sent their books, “Little Honey’s Little Adventures”, to publishers, but none picked them up. They did get “rejection with ink” from a number of publishers, though. That’s when a publisher declines to take on your book but offers comments on them, as a professor in college might. It’s a big deal.

“A lot of publishers told us, ‘These are lovely, tender-hearted stories but they weren’t looking for stories so ‘simple and little'”. Tara and Rachel decided to self-publish through Amazon. That was in 2016. Since then, Amazon has begun printing hard-cover books as long as they’re 75 pages or more. So Tara and Rachel compiled a total of eight paperback storybooks into two compilations in hardback.

Crafting and Bonding

Libraries favor hardback books, Tara said, because paperback books don’t hold up as well.

“Now we take the hardback books to craft shows and offer to donate them to school libraries if we can do author readings for groups of kids. Once Rachel retires, which will likely be this year, Tara says they’ll visit more libraries and donate books and do readings. “It’s been a lovely bonding experience for us,” Tara said of this project with her sister.

“And now we have our first hardback books, which we’re really excited about,” she said.

Tara and Rachel were born in Washington Pennsylvania, but her parents were originally from Baltimore and moved back to Woodlawn when they were very young. The Digby Road in the books is the same Digby Road they grew up on! Tara remembers their youth–the one Rachel captures with darling brevity–fondly.

And: We had a really fun time talking to Eric about his life as a legislator.

Except for one thing. “We grew up in the 60s in a totally segregated neighborhood. There were no brown and black children in our neighborhood, but there are in these stories,” Tara said with a hint of concern in her voice. “We decided not to perpetuate the bad things and tell a new story.” I absolutely loved that idea: tell a new story. After all, we’re all telling stories about ourselves every day, to ourselves and to others. Where these contain pain, we can be proactive authors and rewrite them. That’s not to say we should deny our pasts. But as Tara continued, “We included black and brown kids in the hopes that we might change the future a little bit.”

Tara nodded and her eyes actually sparkled in that moment. But then, all of the Ebersoles are sparkly people. Tara and Eric have three children: Caroline, Rebecca, and James. Their brood of grandchildren is growing all the time.

Tara said when it came time to edit the books, she and Rachel would meet for lunch and go over each page. “We pored over every word,” she said. At some point, it became like dealing with an asymptote. I reminded her that it had probably been 40 years since my last science class.

“It’s like you get closer and closer but you never quite get there,” she explained. All creative people experience this: when is a work finished? “We finally had to say, ‘We’re done. We’re not going to do this anymore. She lightly banged the table. And I remembered one of my favorite things about her: she’s the drummer in Blues State, for which Eric provides lead vocals.

Just then Eric came in with my cup of tea. “The drummer’s–the drummer and the bass player–really in charge of the band. She fits in very nicely and keeps us under control,” Eric said. Control Eric? Wow–she really is something else! Just then I thought of how Eric had told me a few years ago that he kept the collage I made him using his campaign yard sign in his home office. Or as he says, “aah-fice”, which I tease him about. When I made those collages for lots of HoCo Dems using their yard signs, I didn’t think about the fact that I’d have to track them down to give them their gifts.

Somehow I had heard that Eric would be at the George Howard Building until about 5:00 p.m. one day. So went over there. The dusk was turning to night, when who should walk out of the building but Eric and Tara Ebersole! I showed Eric the collage, and Tara let out a peep of delight. Back in the Ebersole’s family room, I thought, “Well, I knew Tara was sparkly–but she can be peepy too!”

“When you play the drums…it’s less about knowing the music as much as it is a feeling,” Tara said. Speaking of which, Tara thinks her next act may be an instructor for Drums Alive, a fitness program that she thinks would be great to take to senior centers.

“Now what?” was part of the reason these books came to fruition. Tara completed a rigorous program in Public Policy in pursuit of a Ph.D. at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

“It had driven me for so long. When it was over…I felt sort of empty,” she said. “It was like, what goals do I have now? Working on these books really filled that hole for me.”

I remarked that she probably used the knowledge she gained in that Ph.D. program in her position as chair of the Baltimore County Central Committee. Tara said she really wants her time and energy to be spent making a difference, but she hasn’t landed on what a future in politics looks like for her.

Tara said her kids and grandkids really loved the books, even as some of the grandkids are too young to understand the characters in them are based on Tara and her siblings. By the way, one of the young buys in some of the stories is named “Eric”. But he wasn’t named after the Ebersole Eric. The person that character is based on is actually an “Eric” in his own right!

Lessons to Learn

Another thing I loved about these books was that at the end of each, Rachel explicitly lists the lessons to take away from them.

“We were thinking maybe a parent would read it to their kid and say, ‘What did you think of those lessons? Did you agree with them? Not agree with them?'”

Tara and her sister felt that the lessons at the end of each book were the ones they learned when they lived these stories.

“That’s why these stories stood out in our minds: because we learned about friendship, and we learned about hope, and we learned about forgiveness,” Tara said. She clasped her hands at the side of her face. “These stories helped shape who we became as adults.”

The books have a dedicated website, which includes a blog to which either Tara or Rachel posts monthly. Tara took a class in marketing for small businesses to help her understand how to bring these stories to a wide audience. “Because you’ve got to have your followers,” Tara said.

I raised my hand eagerly, and Tara leaned over and laughed her golden laugh.

It Was Meant to Be

I don’t know how to fit this into the rest of the article, but I love it too much not to include it. Both Tara and Eric have brothers who are nine years younger than they are. Both of those brothers live 3,000 miles away, albeit in different directions. They both married women with different ethnic backgrounds than their own. And they both have one son! I’ve heard stories like this before where people find out after coming into each other’s lives that they have unusual, specific things in common.

“These are great books. Anyone who sees them would want them for their children,” Tara’s friend Nayna Campbell wrote in a testimonial on the books’ website. “I especially like the suggestions about what Little Honey [the main character in the books] learned from these life experiences.” That’s just what I had said–a woman after my own heart.

Also: We talked to Del. Vanessa Atterbeary about what got her interested in politics.

And then it occurred to me: maybe Tara would like to see the film “Lady of Heaven”, about the early days of Islam, with me. I had only just heard of it that day. But Tara already knew of it and had been wanting to see it. Like “Little Honey’s Little Adventures”, “Lady of Heaven” is a historically accurate but stylized retelling of actual events.

What’s ahead, I asked Tara. She said she and Eric have thought about traveling, and more so now that things are uncertain with the district lines redrawn. “We always wanted to travel, but we didn’t foresee having grandkids we wouldn’t want to be apart from for long periods,” she said.  There’s HoCo (and BaltCo) always pulling the Ebersoles back into its orbit. As I said to Eric, he–and Tara too–will always be a part of HoCo.

“Tara is a renaissance woman. She has a tremendous menu of diverse talents. I have seen several of them on display through our years together-from teaching to politics to playing music,” Eric said stopping to talk to us as he walked by. Eric knew of Tara’s flair for visual arts, but he’d never seen an example of it until she illustrated these books. “As with all the rest of her talents, I haven’t been disappointed. Her work is extraordinary here.”

Tara walked me to the door. We agreed to see the movie on Friday. I descended the steps, stopped, and turned around. “Well, Tara,” I said, “I’m off tell my story–a new story!”

Thanks for reading! Check back with us here at rocoinhoco.com every week as Robert, Colleen (and pup, Moses) get to know the many facets—one each week–of this prismatic place called Howard County. We want to take you along with us, so follow us on Twitter at @rocoinhoco, join our Facebook group, and follow us on Instagram at @rocoinhoco.