My email inbox is often filled with junk of a random kind. I’ve been targeted for various medications, love potions, wanted ads, and a strange assortment of FREE OFFERS ONLY FOR YOU LORE FERGUSON IF YOU ACT NOW AND SEND THIS MESSAGE TO TEN OF YOUR VERY BEST FRIENDS. Needless to say, I glance over my email messages checking for familiar names and that’s pretty much it.
Recently an email arrived in my inbox with an all too familiar name, and an accompanying link. I clicked and what I read disheartened me.

I first discovered her during my censored library days. After weeks of bringing home Babysitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High at age ten, my mother put an end to this frivolous reading spell and before checking out required me to place my stack of the allotted ten books per card per visit in front of her for approval. Needless to say, my taste in literature was quickly sated with words of a better standard. Troubling a Star was my first delve into the works of Madeleine L’Engle and I feel that I can say with certainty two things: one, I knew that here was someone I could trust implicitly, and two, here was someone I could admire fully.

Over the past fifteen years I have collected every Madeleine L’Engle book I could find. When I visit a used bookstore, as I am somewhat known to do (On occasion. Sometimes. Mostly. Always.), I first head for the L section of juvenile fiction, then adult fiction, then non-fiction. She writes all three. The last is my favorite.

There is a small used bookstore in Quetzaltengo, Guatemala specializing in English books. It was my favorite haunt while I lived there and one day I found my favorite of Madeleine’s books, A Circle of Quiet, autographed, inscribed, for ten quetzals. I quickly nabbed. This past summer, though, my beloved roommate, most trustworthy of all of us, lost that copy en route to Chicago. She sat on my bed in tears and admitted this loss, quickly assuring me that she’d already been on Ebay and bought me another signed copy and that she was entirely sorry and deeply apologetic (you have to know Beca, she’s always deeply apologetic, but she was even more so this time). I laughed and of course said it was fine, and that the autograph didn’t matter to me that much anyway.

But when the new copy came, we were both pleasantly surprised by not only the autograph and inscription, but also the blue inked pages following—the owner of this book had obviously found a favorite as well. I’m surprised they parted with it.

In the past few years Madeleine’s output has dwindled and I anxiously wait for new titles to grace a shelf, but to no avail. I gathered her last few and savored them knowing that this woman was reaching that swift decent she had once written about in Summer of the Great-Grandmother: This is the summer of the great-grandmother, more her summer than any other summer. This is the summer after her ninetieth birthday, the summer of the swift decent.

The email in my inbox announced that swift decent with all the journalistic flair it could muster. This obituary writer, filing one more famous death away on their resume, couldn’t describe the weight of this literary mother. Couldn’t define the depth of her impact. Could only write and say facts, dates, children, names, places, books. There was nothing of this inspiration, nothing of this great imagination, nothing of the definition, or redefinition of Children’s Literature, capital L.

And I’m afraid I can’t do any better. I was only a reader, a devoted student, an active follower, but I didn’t know her either. All I know is that she’s gone now and what’s left is 60 books on a resume, a few book prizes, a four-part memoir, and generations of children and grown-ups who secret in their heart their own impression of this mistress of Literature.

She was beautiful, that’s all I know. And I’m thankful for her impression on me.