The sky went strange on Tuesday. The smoke was still high up then, from the fires down in Oregon and California and over the mountains here, all of them at once, and the light in my apartment was wrong. Not dark, exactly. Orange, and flat, as if someone had put a filter over the whole city. The sun came up as a red coin and stayed that way, and you could look straight at it.

Then on Thursday night the smoke came down to the ground, and it hasn't left.

Since then it's only gotten worse. Yesterday the air quality here was among the worst anywhere in the world, which is a sentence I never expected to type about Seattle. The mountains are gone. The Space Needle, which I can usually see from the corner, is gone. From my window I can see about four blocks, and past that the city just turns brown and stops. There's ash on the windowsill outside, fine and gray, like someone has been sweeping a fireplace on the roof.

So I'm staying in, like everyone. The windows are shut and I've taped a towel along the gap under the door to the hall, which my mother suggested and which I suspect does nothing. I bought the last box fan at the hardware store on Thursday afternoon, before it came down, and strapped a furnace filter to the back of it with bungee cords, on the advice of the internet, and it hums in the corner and the filter is going gray. I haven't been for a walk since Thursday. I didn't know how much the walks were holding me together until I couldn't take them.

It's a strange thing, after six months of staying inside because the air might be dangerous, to have to stay inside because the air plainly is. At least this time you can see it. I've found that almost a relief, which tells you something about the year.

The forecast says rain might come later this week and clear it. Everyone on my street is waiting for that rain the way they wait for nothing else. I've never wanted Seattle weather so badly in my life.

Mostly I think about the people near the fires, who've lost houses and towns, and feel foolish for writing about a box fan. But this is what it's like here, this week, and I wanted to put it down.

Something has happened to my mail this year. There's more of it.

Not bills. Letters. Real ones, in envelopes, with stamps and handwriting. In a normal year I get maybe two personal letters a month, not counting my mother, who doesn't count because she writes every week and always has. Since April I've been getting two or three a week. Friends from college I hadn't heard from in years. A cousin in Bemidji. Kristin, who usually manages three lines on the back of a drawing, sent four pages in May, on her kids' drawing paper, with a crayon horse on the reverse of page three.

I think it's that everybody's home. People have time they didn't have, and nowhere to go, and a phone that's mostly bad news. A letter is a way to talk to someone that doesn't come with a headline attached. You sit down, you choose your words, you lick an envelope, and for twenty minutes you're somewhere else. I know that's how it works for me. Answering letters this spring has been the one part of every week I've looked forward to without reservation.

Some of them are new correspondents, too. A few people who wrote to me last year about the brother's grave quest have written again, not about the quest this time, but just to say how they're doing. One of them is a retired mail carrier in Oregon, who has very firm views about how to address an envelope, and who wrote to tell me his garden was the best it had ever been because he'd had nothing else to do. I've started to look forward to his letters the way you look forward to a show.

And there's something else I've noticed. People write differently this year. Longer, slower, more honest. When you can't see anyone, I think you say more on paper than you would across a table. A friend from my tabletop days wrote me two pages about her divorce, which she'd never mentioned in three years of phone calls. A man I worked with at my first job wrote about his father in a care home he can't visit. I've read every one twice and answered every one by hand, the way my mother taught me, and in the answers I've found myself saying things I wouldn't have said either.

I hope we keep this, after. I suspect most people won't. But some will, and I'll be writing back to them.

I promised in March I'd write about what I miss, working from home, and it's taken me this long to work out what it is. It's the arguments.

Dialogue at the studio was never really written alone. You'd draft a scene, and then you'd go and find someone in the hallway and read it to them, or make them read it to you, and they'd say "she wouldn't say that," and you'd say "she would," and ten minutes later, standing by the coffee machine, the two of you would have found the line she actually would say. Half the good dialogue I've written came out of those hallway arguments. The rest came from losing them.

You can't have a hallway argument on a video call. I've tried. Someone has to share their screen, and someone else is muted and doesn't know it, and the cat walks across a keyboard. By the time everyone's ready to argue, the thing that made you want to argue has gone. The calls are fine for deciding things. They're no good for finding things.

So I've been writing dialogue alone, at the kitchen table, and reading it out loud to the empty apartment. I take both parts. I've found I do one voice slightly higher than the other without meaning to, which my neighbors must enjoy. It works, sort of. It's slower. I miss the moment when someone else's face does something I didn't expect while they're reading my line, and I know it's wrong before they say a word.

Owen is the strange exception. He's been on most of my calls since March, for one reason or another, and in three months I haven't once seen his face. His camera is never on. His picture is a gray square with an initial in it. I asked him about it in April and he said "the internet doesn't need to see my kitchen," and that was that. But the odd thing is, he's the one I can still argue with. He doesn't need the hallway. He says one word, usually "no," and then waits, and the silence does the rest. I've rewritten more lines this spring because of Owen's silences than because of anyone's notes.

I think that's what I'm learning. The arguments were never about the hallway. They were about having someone on the other side who'd tell me when I was wrong. I can still find that, it just takes more asking.

I've been walking. Not anywhere in particular. In the mornings before work and again at five, after I've talked to my mother, I put on my shoes and go out, because the alternative is the kitchen table, and I've spent enough time with the kitchen table.

The city is empty in a way I'll never see again, I hope. Broadway on a weekday at noon, with nobody on it. The bus going by with two people aboard, sitting as far apart as the bus allows. Restaurants with chairs stacked on the tables and handwritten signs in the windows that started out saying "Back soon" and now just say "Thank you." I walked downtown one Sunday and stood in the middle of a street I used to have to wait three light changes to cross, and I could hear a flag rattling on a pole a block away.

Volunteer Park is where I go most. It's busier than the streets, but everyone walks a wide arc around everyone else, nodding, like people passing in a hallway at a funeral. The rhododendrons came out anyway, enormous and pink and indifferent, and it's been strange to see them so lovely in a spring when nobody can enjoy anything properly.

And there are the crows. There have always been crows here, but I never paid much attention to them until now, when they're the busiest thing on the street. They walk down the middle of the sidewalk as if they've been waiting years for us to get out of the way. There's a pair that sits on the wire outside my building in the mornings and watches me leave. I've started saying good morning to them. I'm aware of how that sounds.

Someone at the university here did a famous study, years ago, where researchers in masks caught and banded crows, and for years afterward the crows would scold anyone who walked by in those masks, and teach their young to do it too. They remember faces. They hold grudges. They tell each other. I think about that every time I walk past my two on the wire with my own face half covered. I hope they've decided I'm all right.

I don't know what the city will be like when this is over. I don't know if anything will be the way it was. But I've seen it this spring with nobody in it, and I've learned the name of every street between here and the lake, and which house has the dog that barks at everyone except me. I'd like to keep walking like this, after, though I suspect I won't.

What have you noticed this spring that you'd never have seen otherwise?

Every evening at seven, my mother's time, I call her. That's five o'clock here, which means I stop work at five, which I never used to do. It's the best thing that has come out of the last month, and I'm a little ashamed it took a pandemic.

For the first week the calls were about the news, and they were awful. We'd go through the numbers together like two people reading a weather report for a storm neither of us could leave. By the end of each call we were both worse off than when we started. So the second week she announced, in her library voice, that we were going to read a book together instead.

She chose Peril at End House, because it's Christie and because it was on the shelf next to her chair. I have my own copy here, an old paperback I bought at a sale years ago and never read, and that turned out to matter: she wanted us both to be reading paper, so neither of us could cheat by searching for a name. We read three chapters a day, no more, and at seven we talk about them.

I didn't expect how much I'd love it. My mother reads a mystery the way she ran a library: closely, with a pencil. She keeps a list of suspects on an index card and moves them up and down as we go. She had the murderer by chapter nine and wouldn't tell me, and when I accused her of having read it before, she said she had, in 1971, and had forgotten it entirely, and had worked it out again from first principles, which she considered a point in her favor. I suspected the wrong person until the end, as Christie intended. My mother says I always suspect the most interesting person, which is a writer's mistake.

We finished it on Thursday and started Five Little Pigs. It's a better book. A painter was poisoned sixteen years ago, his wife was convicted, and Poirot has to solve it from the memories of five people who were there. Every chapter someone tells the same afternoon a little differently. My mother says it's the most honest book Christie wrote about how people remember things, and she's right, and she's only halfway through.

Today is Easter. Normally she'd go to church and then to a neighbor's for lunch, and this year she did neither. So we had a long call instead, three chapters and an hour after, and she told me what she'd have cooked if anyone were coming, in detail, course by course. I made myself a sandwich while she described the ham.

Is there someone you've been talking to more this month than you have in years?