So far it's been gray and wet and mild, the lake steaming on the cold mornings, and everyone I meet says the same thing about the winter, which is that it's coming. They say it the way people here say everything about winter, as a kindness and a warning at once.

This is my first winter living here since I left for college, and I'm more nervous than I let my mother see. In Seattle, winter was a long rain. You put on a better jacket and complained about the light. Here it's something you prepare for, like a test. I have bought boots that the man at the store called "real boots," with the emphasis of someone who had looked at the ones I came in wearing. I have a scraper in the car, and a blanket, and a candle in a coffee can, because my mother says so and has for thirty years.

The office has its own weather. The building's heat came on in October, and the two radiators in our room have entirely different personalities. The one by the windows knocks, like someone who wants to be let in, mostly around nine in the morning and again at four. The one by the door hisses, and does very little else. Owen has bled them both, read a long forum thread about steam heat from 2009, and given them names, which I'm not allowed to tell you.

The print shop downstairs closes at six. After that the building gets quieter and colder at about the same rate, and if I'm working late, I can tell the time by my hands.

If you've lived through real winters, what do you wish someone had told you before your first one?

From my apartment, with the window open, I can hear the Lift Bridge. I can't see it, but I can hear it. A boat comes up to the canal and blows its horn, and the bridge answers with the same notes, and the span goes up, and a thousand feet of steel slides through a gap in the town not much wider than a parking lot. It happens many times a day, and sometimes at three in the morning. People who move here complain about it for a month, and then they stop hearing it, and then, if they ever leave, they miss it.

I left, and I missed it, and I didn't know it was the horn I'd been missing until I came home.

When I was small, my mother would take me down to the canal when my father's boat was due. You could find out roughly when from the paper, or from a phone number that played a recording of the day's arrivals. We'd stand at the end of the pier with a thermos, and when his boat came in, the captain would blow the salute and the bridge would answer it, and my mother would say, every time, "That's for us." It wasn't. It was for every boat. I believed her until I was eleven, and after that I kept believing her on purpose.

He couldn't wave. He was down in the engine room, where the engineers are, and he told me later that he couldn't really hear the horn down there over the engines, only feel it in the deck. But he knew we'd be on the pier, and that was enough for him, and it was enough for me.

He died eighteen years ago this month. I walk down to the canal now and then, mornings mostly, and when a boat comes in and the horn goes, I still say it under my breath.

That's for us.

Every character I've written got their name late, after I knew who they were. This one came first, and I've spent a year growing into it.

She's named after Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's detective. Not because she's a detective, though she does run the cases. Because of what he's like. He's tired and funny and nobody's fool, and he can't be bought. People lie to him all day. He goes down those mean streets anyway, and he keeps faith with whoever trusted him.

So I gave her one rule before I gave her anything else: she never lies to a player. She can choose what to say. She can say "not yet." But what she tells you is true. It's a rule I've tried to live by and mostly haven't. I wanted to make something that could.

Owen, who has opinions about which Marlowe, insists she's named after the other one. He's wrong, and he knows it, and he will not stop.

It's a strange thing, naming something that will talk back. If you could build someone to sit across the table from you while you worked a problem, who would you want them to be?

Since I moved out of my mother's spare room in May, into the apartment with the bathtub view she advised against, I've gone back to her house every Sunday for dinner. Nobody arranged it. The first Sunday she called at four and asked if I'd eaten, and I said no, and that was the arrangement.

She cooks what she always cooked: pot roast, hotdish when she's tired, walleye when someone's given her walleye, which in Duluth is often. We eat at the kitchen table, never the dining room, which is for Christmas and for spreading out tax papers. After dinner she washes and I dry, as we did when I was eight, and we talk, and somewhere in the drying she finds out everything I did that week without asking a single direct question. It's the librarian in her. She knows where everything is filed.

Owen comes sometimes. The first time was in April, while I still lived there, because my mother had asked me three times when she'd meet him. He arrived with a bottle of wine and the face of a man walking into a job interview. She sat him at my father's end of the table, which I don't think he noticed and I did. They talked about the furnace for forty minutes. He offered to look at it. She let him, which she has never let anyone do.

She approves of him. She hasn't said so, because she wouldn't, but she has called him "a sensible person," which from her is a medal. I told her we're friends and we work together, and she said she knew that perfectly well, and it had nothing to do with that. Now she asks "Is Owen coming?" in a tone that suggests the answer ought to be yes. He's been four times. Last week he brought a pie.

It's a small thing, a dinner. But for ten years I ate most of my dinners standing at a kitchen counter in Seattle with a book propped against the toaster. On Sundays now I sit at a table with a cloth on it, with my mother and, now and then, my oldest friend from work, and nobody is in a hurry to get up.

Every morning since I came home, I've walked the Lakewalk before going in to the office. I park by the rose garden at Leif Erikson Park, walk down to the Lift Bridge and back, and then climb the stairs and sit at my desk smelling of lake, which Owen says is a fine smell on a person and a strange one on a laptop.

I walked this path a thousand times as a teenager and never once looked at it. I was busy, and the lake was just there, the way your own front door is there. I look at it now. I can't seem to stop.

When I got back in March the lake was wide open, hardly any ice on it at all. Everyone told me I'd missed winter, that it had been the warmest anyone could remember, brown at Christmas, the ski hill making its own snow. Then, at the end of the month, the biggest storm of the year came through and closed the schools, and I walked the Lakewalk in snow to the tops of my boots, past people shoveling with the expressions of people who had been promised something.

Now it's April, and the lake is cold and green-gray and enormous, and different every morning. Some days it's flat as a plate. Some days it comes over the rocks below the path and leaves a skin of ice on the railings. One morning a fog came in so fast it took the Lift Bridge out of the sky while I was looking at it, and the only way I knew the bridge was still there was the horn. The boats are back. The first big ones of the season came under the bridge while I was still unpacking, and now I count them on the way to work, the way I counted cars as a child.

In Seattle I had the Sound and Lake Washington, and I loved them, but they were scenery. This lake is weather. It decides what the day will be, and you find out on the walk.

I'm still in my mother's spare room, which we both call temporary. It has the good bed, and the stain on the ceiling that's the shape of Lake Superior, and it's very strange to fall asleep every night under a picture of the thing I walk beside every morning.