Two weeks ago my mother went out the back door to take the compost to the bin, the way she has every morning for forty years, and the second step down was ice under a skin of snow. She put her right hand out, as everyone does, and broke her wrist.

She called me herself, from the emergency room, with her arm in a temporary splint, and gave me the facts in the order of their importance, like a reference librarian. She had fallen. She had broken her wrist. It was not her hip. The neighbor had driven her. She had already eaten. She did not need me to come. I was on a plane two days later.

I was home for a week. Duluth in February is about what you'd imagine. The inside of my nose froze on the walk from the car to the house the first night, and I'd forgotten that, and I was absurdly pleased to remember. I shoveled. I salted the steps, all of them, twice a day, while she supervised from the kitchen window with her arm in a sling, in case I did it wrong. I drove her to the orthopedist, who was younger than me, and she asked him where he'd trained in a tone that made him tell her.

What stays with me from the week is her indignation. She wasn't frightened, or if she was, it was well hidden under how offended she was. She has salted those steps since before I was born. She knows that step. The step, in her account, had behaved unforgivably. On the third day she told me, very calmly, that she intended to outlive it.

I did the cooking, the dishes, the mail, the trash, and the buttons, which she hated most. She let me do all of it except cut her food. She cut her own food with the side of her fork, slowly, for a week, rather than let me do it, and I learned to look at something else while she did.

She has a cast now, and six weeks of it to go, and then therapy. She's fine. She'd want me to say that first, so I'll say it last, which she'll notice.

How do you help someone who'd much rather you didn't?

The year's reading, more or less in the order I read it. Thirty-one books, which is fewer than last year, when I had nowhere to go, and more than the year before, when I did.

• Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier. A second wife in a great house where the first one is everywhere. I read it in January, under a blanket, which is how it wants to be read.
• A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles. A count sentenced to spend the rest of his life inside a Moscow hotel, who makes a whole world of it. It seemed the right book for a year of rooms, and it was one of the kindest things I read.
• The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler. A reread. I've stopped counting. It gets sadder every time, and I think the book is staying the same.
• Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro. I wrote about it in March. I haven't lent my copy to anyone, because I keep meaning to reread the last chapter and then not doing it.
• The Searcher, Tana French. A retired Chicago detective buys a falling-down house in the west of Ireland and a local kid won't leave him alone. Jonah wrote in the spring to recommend it, and I passed it on to my mother the day I finished.
• Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir. Read on the plane to Duluth in June, which was a mistake, because I laughed out loud twice and the man beside me changed seats.
• Razorblade Tears, S. A. Cosby. Two fathers, both out of prison, both of whose sons have been murdered. Violent and angry and very tender, sometimes in one sentence.
• Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead. A furniture salesman in 1960s Harlem who is only a little bit crooked, and keeps trying to stay that way. I'd follow him anywhere.
• The Man Who Died Twice, Richard Osman. The club again. Just as good, and I was glad of them again by October.
• The Sentence, Louise Erdrich. A ghost haunts a small bookstore in Minneapolis through the worst year of the city's recent memory. It's about grief and books and Minnesota, and I read it in two nights and then called my mother.

The other twenty-one were mysteries I'll forget by spring, a stack of tabletop rulebooks I read for work and pleasure in roughly equal parts, and one very long biography I didn't finish and won't name, out of respect for its author and my own pride.

What should I read in 2022?

Every December a card comes from Ohio. It's always a cardinal, the state bird, on snow, and it's always written edge to edge in blue ink in a hand that was taught by someone who meant it. This year's came on Wednesday. It's the fifth.

It's from a reader, a retired schoolteacher who found this blog through a post about letters, and who has written to me every December since. I won't say more about her than that, because she didn't ask to be written about. But I want to say something about what she's given me, which is a friendship made almost entirely of paper.

We've never met. We've never spoken on the phone. I know her handwriting better than I know the faces of some people I've worked beside for years. I know what she grows, which grandchildren call, and what she thought of a book I recommended in 2019 (not much, kindly put). She knows more about my mother's garden than most of my friends in Seattle do. Once a year we bring each other up to date, and in between she sometimes leaves a comment here, and that's the whole of it. It is a real friendship. I'd be hurt if anyone said otherwise.

She has written to a woman in Lancashire every month for twenty-six years. They've met twice. When she told me that, I understood how she'd been able to make something so warm out of a card a year. She has had practice.

My mother would approve of all of it, and does. Her rules for letters were the first rules I ever learned that weren't about crossing the street. Answer within the week. Date it in full, because someone may keep it. Never type a thank-you. Write the way you'd talk to them if they were across the table, and then cut a third of it. I still follow every one, though the last one is honored mostly in the breach.

I answered today, on the good paper, at the kitchen table with the lamps on. It'll go out tomorrow and get there after Christmas, as it always does, and she'll forgive me for that, as she always does.

Is there someone you know mostly, or only, through what they've written to you?

It's a quarter to four and I've just turned the lamps on.

Seattle's November is not cold, by the standards I grew up with. It's dark. The sun goes down before half past four now, and on most days there's no sun to go down, only a gray ceiling that gets slowly grayer until it's black. It's rained most of the month. Not hard. It just doesn't stop.

In Duluth the winter was darker on paper but brighter in fact, because there was snow. The snow took whatever light there was and threw it back at you. I remember walking home from school in December at four in the afternoon in what felt like the last bright hour on earth, everything blue and white, the lake steaming. Here the light doesn't bounce. It soaks in.

There's a moment some afternoons, around two, when the cloud thins over the Sound and a little sun comes in sideways through my west window and lies across the floor for ten minutes. I've learned to stop what I'm doing when it comes. I take my coffee to the patch of floor and stand in it like a cat. My neighbor across the way does the same thing; I've seen her at her window. We've never spoken, but we've nodded.

The rest of the time I have lamps. I've become a person with opinions about lamps. Warm bulbs, low, several of them, never the overhead. My mother does the same thing in her kitchen, and I used to think it was thrift.

How do you get through the dark months where you are?

When I started writing dialogue for money, I thought the job was talking. You decide what a character needs to say, and you make it sound like them. That's part of it. But the longer I do this, the more I think dialogue is mostly listening, and the talking is what's left over afterward.

Listening in two directions. The first is out in the world. People almost never answer the question they were asked. They answer the one they heard, or the one they were afraid of, or the one they wish you'd asked. A man on the bus on Thursday told someone on the phone, "I'm not mad, I'm just saying it once," and I wrote it down before he'd finished the sentence, because every person I've ever known has said some version of that, and none of them were telling the truth. You can't invent that kind of line. You have to be in the room when someone says it.

I didn't realize how much I depended on that until last year, when I stopped riding the bus and stopped standing in kitchens with other people. My lines got tidier. People in my drafts started answering each other's questions directly, in full sentences, like witnesses. It took me months to notice what was wrong, and the fix was going back outside.

The second direction is harder, and it's specific to games. In a game, one of the people in the conversation can't talk. The player picks from a list, or picks nothing, or walks away in the middle. So every character I write has to sound as if they're listening to someone who mostly isn't saying anything. A good line in a game answers something the player didn't say: the hesitation, the fact that they came back, the fact that they're still standing there. When it works, players tell me the character "got" them. When it doesn't, the character sounds like a vending machine with a sad story.

The only exercise I trust is reading everything aloud, in the voice of the person who'll be listening to it. If I can hear myself as the player wanting to interrupt, the line is too long. If I can't hear myself wanting to answer at all, it's too closed.

What's the best thing you've overheard this year?