On Wednesday the studio sent everyone home. We'd seen it coming for two weeks, as the news got worse and the other companies around the lake emptied out one after another, and still when the email came it felt sudden. We had until the end of the day to pack up. I took my second monitor, my good keyboard, a plant that will probably die anyway, and the notebook I'd left in my desk drawer since Christmas.

The building was strange that afternoon. People were carrying boxes to their cars and making jokes about it being a long weekend, and nobody quite believed the jokes. Someone from facilities stood by the doors and told everyone who left to wash their hands and call their mothers, in that order. I did both.

My office now is the kitchen table. The monitor sits on three cookbooks I have never cooked from, which is the most use they've ever had. My chair is a kitchen chair, and by Thursday afternoon my back had filed a formal complaint. The window looks out over the street, and the street is very quiet. I can hear the crows. I didn't know there were so many.

Working from home is fine. That's the truth, and I keep saying it to people on calls, and it keeps being true. Meetings are just as long. The documents are the same documents. I get more done, actually, because no one can stop by my desk to ask a question that turns into an hour, and I miss that more than I expected. I'll write about that another time.

What I can't stop thinking about is my mother. She's sixty-four, she lives alone in the house in Duluth, and she has no intention of changing anything about her life for a virus she has only read about. She volunteers at the library two mornings a week, and they've told the volunteers to stay home, which she took personally. She goes to the grocery store every Saturday at eight, when it opens, and has done so for thirty years. I asked her to let me order her groceries for a while, and she said she'd think about it in a tone that meant she wouldn't.

I can't get to her. That's the part I keep returning to. Flying isn't something anyone should be doing right now, and driving is three days. If she got sick, there'd be no one in that house but her, and I'd be here at my kitchen table, sixteen hundred miles away, with my monitor on my cookbooks. I know she has neighbors. I know half of Lakeside owes her a favor. I know she's tougher than I am and always has been. I've called her every day this week anyway.

I don't have anything wise to say about any of this. I don't think anyone does yet. I'm washing my hands. I'm calling my mother. I'm learning which floorboards in my apartment creak when I pace, which is all of them.

How are you holding up, and who are you worried about?

I started a new notebook this week, and while I was copying the things over that I copy over every time, I counted. I have forty-one filled notebooks in a box in my closet, going back to the summer I was twelve. I keep meaning to throw out the early ones. I keep not doing it.

They're all the same kind now: plain black covers, lined pages, small enough for a coat pocket. I tried the expensive ones with the ribbon and the numbered pages, and I found I wouldn't write anything in them unless it was good, which defeats the purpose. A notebook has to be cheap enough to waste.

What's in them is mostly lines. Things people say on the bus. Things people say in meetings, which are often stranger. A woman at the next table in a café last spring told her friend, "He's not a bad man, he's just always somewhere else," and that went straight in, and some version of it has been in three games since. Overheard dialogue is the best kind because nobody wrote it. It has the shape of real speech, which runs on and doubles back and leaves the important thing unsaid.

Then there are lists. Books I mean to read. Letters I owe, crossed off as I answer them. Names I like, with no idea who they belong to. I name characters last, after I know them, but I collect the names for years first. Some of them have been waiting since college. When a character finally turns up who fits one, it feels less like choosing and more like a reunion.

There are drawings, too, if you can call them that. Maps of places that don't exist, floor plans of houses where a scene happens, so I know which door someone comes through. My handwriting in them gets worse the later it was written. At the bottom of some pages from two in the morning there's a line I can't read at all, and I've always been certain it was the best idea I ever had.

At the back of every notebook I keep the same three things, copied forward each time. My mother's phone number, though I've known it by heart since I was four. The address of a friend I write to. And a sentence my father said to me once on the dock, when I was small and impatient for a boat that was late: "It's coming whether you watch or not." I don't know why I've kept that one. I just have.

The year in books, or the ones worth mentioning. Fewer than last year, because of the promotion and the letters, and more of them read on the bus than I'd like to admit. In the order I read them:

• The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins. A diamond goes missing from a country house, and half the household takes a turn telling you what happened. I read it during the snow days, which is the right weather for a book this long.
• The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler. The reread I wrote about in March. Still the one.
• In the Woods, Tana French. Her first, which I'd managed to skip. Three children go into a wood outside Dublin and only one comes out, and twenty years later he's a detective working a new murder in the same place. I'm still annoyed about the ending, which I suspect is the point.
• 84, Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff. Twenty years of letters between a New York writer and a London bookshop. I'd somehow never read it. My mother was appalled and sent me her copy by return mail, with a note telling me to send it back.
• Case Histories, Kate Atkinson. After Transcription last year I went back for her detective. Three old cases in Cambridge and a private investigator who can't leave any of them alone. Funnier than it has any right to be, and then not funny at all.
• Gilead, Marilynne Robinson. An old minister writes a long letter to his young son, to be read after he's gone. I read it in July, during the letters, and it was too much and exactly enough.
• The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith. I spent the whole book wanting him to get caught and the whole book hoping he wouldn't. Highsmith knew precisely what she was doing to me.
• The Chill, Ross Macdonald. Recommended by a reader after the summer, with a note that said "trust me." I did. A missing bride, and a past that won't stay buried. The plot is a watch with too many gears, and every one of them turns.
• The Dutch House, Ann Patchett. A brother and sister turned out of the house they grew up in, who spend decades parking outside it. Not a mystery, though it's built like one, around a house and what happened in it.
• The Sentence Is Death, Anthony Horowitz. The author puts himself in the book as the sidekick to a detective he can't stand. A pleasure from start to finish, and a lesson in how to hide a clue in plain sight.

If I had to pick one, it's The Chill, and I owe somebody a thank-you letter for it.

What was the best thing you read this year?

Every December I clear the kitchen table and answer everything. This year that took most of the weekend.

My mother's rule is that a letter should be answered within a week, and most of the year I manage it. But things pile up, and December is when I go through the pile and pay what I owe. This year the pile was bigger than usual, because the letters about the quest haven't stopped. They've slowed down since the summer, but they still come, two or three a week, and every one gets an answer. I've used up the good paper and gone through most of a second box.

Then there are the cards. I send about sixty. My mother sends more than a hundred and considers me lax. I write something in every one, even if it's only a line, because a card with just a name in it is a receipt, as my mother says. I keep a list in the back of a notebook: who I sent to, who sent to me, and anything I'd want to remember to ask about next year. Whose dog was sick. Who moved. Who had a baby, and its name, spelled right.

There's a point, maybe forty cards in, when my hand starts to cramp and my handwriting turns into something only my mother can read. I take a break, make tea, and look out at the rain. Then I go back and write the next one as carefully as the first, because the person opening it will only see the one.

By this evening the stack on the table was stamped and ready, and I walked it down to the mailbox on the corner in the dark. There's always a moment, letting go of them into the slot, when I want to reach in after them. I never have.

When I was a girl in Duluth, fog came off the lake so thick you could lose the house across the street. On those nights the foghorn on the ship canal would start, low and long, again and again, all night. From our house in Lakeside it was miles off and you could still hear it through a closed window. It wasn't loud. It was deep, the kind of sound you feel in the floor before you hear it.

I loved it. I know people who grew up near a horn like that and say it kept them awake for years. It never kept me awake. It meant the boats were out there, my father on one of them some nights, and that someone on the shore was telling them where the land was. I fell asleep counting the gaps between the blasts the way other children count sheep. I never got very far.

There's a story every Duluth kid hears at some point about the old horn, how it was so loud people complained, and how when they took it away people complained louder. I don't know how much of that is true. My mother says all of it, and she was there.

Seattle fog is different. It comes in from the Sound in the mornings this time of year and sits in the low places, and from the top of my hill you can look down on it, all white, with the tops of the downtown towers standing up out of it like something left behind when the tide went out. By noon it's usually gone. It doesn't have the weight of lake fog. Lake fog arrives like it means to stay the winter.

But some mornings the ferries sound their horns crossing the bay, and if the wind is right I can hear them from my kitchen. Not the same note. Higher, shorter, more businesslike. It still does the thing to me, though. I stand at the counter with my coffee and listen for the next one, and for a second I'm nine, and it's dark, and the house is warm, and somewhere out on the water there's a boat finding its way in.

Now and then the fog doesn't lift until the afternoon. On one of those days last week I walked down to the water in it and could see about half a block in any direction. Everyone I passed came out of it all at once, very close, and said hello in a slightly surprised voice, as if we'd met somewhere unexpected.

Is there a sound from where you grew up that you still listen for?