It was the day of the Great Twitter Outage. But I didn't know that yet. I only knew that something was terribly wrong.

Actually, it was funny, in a kind of pathetic, soul-crushing way: I stared at the blank screen, hitting refresh over and over. Waiting for everyone to come back. For my online life to resume. Finally, I accepted the truth. Twitter, my favorite unreliable news source and constant companion, was gone.

So what did I do?

I walked away from the computer, and out the door, into the startling sunshine of an Atlanta summer morning. The kids and I played in the damp green of the backyard, and then we headed to the playground, where I sat on a park bench and watched my boys climb and swing. We got ice cream.

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Madeleine L'Engle was dead.

Perhaps this sounds grandiose, but I'm serious -- I felt the loss deeply, personally. I was bewildered at the death of a woman I'd never met. Because, to me, Madeleine L'Engle was more than a writer. She was what a sixth grader in an English class -- taking hold of her masterpiece, "A Wrinkle in Time" -- might call a theme. For those of us who write for children, she was a gold standard, a symbol. She was an example of what one could accomplish without succumbing to the easy tropes and obvious forms of fantasy or young adult or science fiction.

Of course, L'Engle wrote all of those things -- fantasy, Y.A., science fiction. But in doing so she reinvented the wheel, she made a bigger, better wheel. Fairies and witches weren't enough for her. Nor were spacemen, time travel or high school romances -- though all of these things, boiled together, created the landscape of her stories.

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