… rather than Karol, but otherwise it’s an okay article.

Excerpts:

In Poland, it was “Byczek Fernando.”

The Polish translation of “The Story of Ferdinand,” a children’s book that chronicles the peaceful life of a Spanish bull who preferred the smell of flowers to the heat of a bullfight is also one of the few children’s books Carlos Soltan can remember from growing up.

So when Soltan and his wife, Margaret, moved into the former home of its author, Munro Leaf, in 1995, the couple began making the abode into “Ferdinand House,” a residence and shrine to the peaceful bull.

“It seemed appropriate to somehow maintain the continuity, preserve the spirit of Munro Leaf,” Soltan said.

Margaret Soltan, an English professor and writer, had grown up across the street from the house, but didn’t know Munro. She knew his wife, Margaret as a potter, adventurer and all-around “strong lady,” but upon moving into the airy cottage with giant windows, felt a writer’s belonging.

“It was such an irony to move into Margaret Leaf’s old house, and I thought it was such a marvelous irony that this was a writer’s house,” Margaret Soltan said. “I think it was when I slowly realized how beloved the book was. It just gradually occurred to me how really marvelous that book is.”

To pay tribute, the Soltans installed a small gold plaque by the door, proclaiming it “Ferdinand House.” In a town where folks know houses not by their current residents, but by their former ones, the Soltans had christened theirs for a larger-than-life fiction.

They installed two topiary bulls in the front yard, discovered after a long search at a Shenandoah roadside stand. The bulls, filled with sphagnum moss, sit not under Ferdinand’s favored Spanish cork tree, but just as serenely under the leafy canopy of Garrett Park. A Picasso sketch of bulls hung in the hall was bought in remembrance of Leaf. For years, the Soltans kept a copy of the tale by the door.

The book, written in 1936 — before the Leafs moved to Garrett Park — was received as a critique of the Spanish Civil War and universally adopted as a pacifist allegory. Leaf wrote more than 30 books, but “Ferdinand” has been read by generations of children and influenced pop culture. The band Fall Out Boy named an album “From Under the Cork Tree” after Ferdinand’s sitting spot, and singer-song writer Elliot Smith had a tattoo of the character.

“It was simple, the illustrations were very simple, the writing was very simple,” Margaret Soltan said. “Underneath the simplicity is kind of this fable, it’s not pushy or manipulative.”

The fable is still being told locally and not only in Garrett Park. Imagination Stage, a children’s theater in Bethesda, commissioned Washington, D.C. playwright Karen Zacharias to adapt the book into a musical in 2001. The result, “Ferdinand the Bull,” is being performed at the theater through Nov. 1.

Laurie Levy-Page, director of marketing at Imagination Stage, said she knew he was from Maryland but “had no idea Munro Leaf had lived nearby.”

… Margaret Soltan has frequently contemplated the character in blog posts about living in the house, from the children that stop to see the bull statue to her belief that the house somehow retains the essence of Leaf and his bull.

“My Ferdinands sit in the shade of a dogwood. Squirrels nibble their sphagnum moss; dogs bark at them. Children stop and point,” blogged Soltan last fall, noting that somewhere the couple even has stationery datelined Ferdinand House. “Is there such a thing as the spirit of a house? If there is, this one’s got a calm, expansive one, I guess.”