I was walking through a gentle rain to pick up my Spriggan from daycare when I got a message from my husband with the news of Allan Ahlberg’s death at age 87.

Well, that hit very hard. They all have, in their own ways: Tomie dePaola, Eric Carle, Lois Ehlert, Ashley Bryan, Shirley Hughes, Jerry Pinkney, Ed Young, and many others, recently. Genius creators, they lived well, made so much beauty– utterly distinctive to each of them– and left us books that live on daily while also reminding us of their lives and what they did. Of course each loss hit hard.

In Allan Ahlberg’s case, I quite simply didn’t think it was possible for him to die. Like Elsie Piddock in Eleanor Farjeon’s marvellous fable, I thought he would simply skip on, rhyme on, atop Caburn, becoming fairy tale and nursery rhyme and something of a myth– forever.

The very best of Allan Ahlberg was a lightness with rich substance to every word. He knew, somehow, that the iamb is rarely the best foot for a children’s book. We can probably thank Mother Goose for passing that along, and when I say that, my soul is absolutely certain the two had a chat on a picnic blanket in the orchard while the goose wandered nearby. “GOO-sey, GOO-sey, GAN-der…” “I spy Tom Thumb…” “Here’s a little baby…” “Ho Ho for the robbers!”

It’s impossible, of course, to write about Allan Ahlberg without reference to his greatest collaborator: first wife, Janet, who died in 1994. I’m not entirely sure Janet wasn’t, somehow, also Mother Goose, discussing those beats and measures and showing how they would look on the page, alive with tiny yet weighty details– before flying lightly off on her goose.

Of course this all just goes to show why one should never speculate too much about an author based on their books. Janet and Allan Ahlberg were real people with lives and loves and troubles and professions I’m only just learning about by reading obituaries (“He once worked as a gravedigger?” I think incredulously. “That might explain Funnybones, but then was he also a captain in the Napoleonic wars? Oh, doesn’t seem to have been. Maybe The Baby in the Hat was fiction, then.”), but these reactions also show what the greatness of someone’s work in life can leave behind them. In this case, a sense of the myth and motion of story as rhythm and rhyme, even through the pragmatic drudgery of our efficient days. Like the Jolly Postman, we take our time through his books: we pause, we laugh, we bounce, we have a cup of tea, we dream from page to page so that a page with ten words on it may take you a cuddle time to read, and who cares how long that is by the clock?

To Janet and Allan Ahlberg, small details mattered intensely: a mirror with a rainbow rim, such a captivating moment. And it’s those moments that catch a tiny finger pointing, with a bigger one beside it, on the page.

And so– Ho Ho for the Ahlbergs! Thank you for the storytimes. You’ve been, and will continue to be, great company. Tonight, I’ll be reading this.