I've been going back to the studio two days a week since the end of August. Tuesdays and Thursdays, masks on, half the desks taped off, a sign on every conference room telling you how many people it holds now, which is about a third of what it used to.

The bus over the bridge is the same bus. I'd forgotten how much I liked it: forty minutes with nothing to do but look at the water and listen to other people's phone calls. I got more writing done in my head on that bus than at any desk I've ever had, and I didn't know it until I'd gone a year and a half without it.

The building is strange. It's built for a lot of people and it has a few, so every sound carries. You can hear someone open a bag of chips from across the floor. The kitchen still smells like the same burnt coffee, which I found more moving than I'd like to admit.

The woman at the front desk was there on my first morning back, the same as she was on my first morning ever, seven years ago, when she checked me in and told me where the good bathroom was and that I'd be fine. I found out this week that she came in through most of the last year, alone some days, to sign for packages and water the plants nobody else remembered. The plants look better than any of us. She looked at me over her mask and said, "You cut your hair," which I had, in my kitchen, in April of last year, badly, and she was kind enough not to say the last part.

And the hallway arguments are back. That's the thing I missed most and didn't know how to say on a video call. On Tuesday, before I'd found my desk, Owen stopped me by the elevators to tell me something I'd said in a meeting in March was wrong, and we stood there for twenty minutes settling it, and neither of us won, and it was the best twenty minutes of my month. You can't do that over a screen. Somebody has to be able to walk away, and somebody has to follow them.

I don't know how long two days a week will last, or whether it'll be more or fewer by Christmas. Nobody does. I'm taking the Tuesdays and Thursdays while they're on offer.

If you've gone back somewhere this year, what was the first thing you noticed?

My mother's garden is three raised beds behind the house, built by my father the summer I turned twelve, out of lumber he swore would last forever. It has lasted twenty-three years, which is close enough. Every board has been replaced at least once since, by my mother, with a level and an opinion.

When I was home in June we weeded it together, on our knees, most mornings before it got warm. She has a system, because she has a system for everything. One bed each. No talking until you reach the end of your row, and then you're allowed to say one thing before you start the next. I hadn't remembered the system until we were out there and I started to say something halfway down a row and she lifted one finger without looking up. I'm a grown woman with a mortgage's worth of rent. It didn't matter.

The things we said at the ends of the rows were mostly about the neighbors. A few were about my father. One was about me, and whether I was happy in Seattle, which she asked to a clump of quackgrass and I answered to the peas.

The peas were climbing then, up the same twine trellis she uses every year, and I ate one pod straight off the vine the way I have since I could reach them, and got the same look I've gotten since I could reach them. They came in properly a couple of weeks after I left. She's been reporting by phone. A very good year for peas, she says, though a dry one for everything else, and she's been carrying water out from the rain barrel in a can because the barrel is empty and she won't run the hose on principle. I didn't ask which principle. There are several.

She shelled them on the back step, she says, and froze what she didn't eat, in bags labeled and dated in her librarian's hand. One bag is marked with my name. It'll be in the freezer whenever I'm home next, behind the rhubarb, where nobody else will touch it.

I have a pot of basil on my windowsill here and I feel I've done my part.

I'm writing this at my mother's kitchen table in Duluth, with the window open and the wind coming up the hill off the lake.

The little plane landed on Wednesday afternoon. My mother was waiting just past security, the way she's waited for me since college, standing very straight with her purse held in front of her in both hands. I meant to say something. I didn't. I put my arms around her and she put hers around me and we stood in the way of everyone coming off the flight until a man with a golf bag had to go around us.

She's smaller than I remembered. I don't think she's changed. I think I'd been carrying her around in my head at the size she was when I was a child, and eighteen months on the phone hadn't corrected it. She smells exactly the same, which I was not prepared for at all.

On Thursday morning I walked down to the lake before she was up. It's a few streets down from the house, and I've walked it a thousand times, and I still stopped at the top of the last block to look. Lake Superior doesn't do anything for anyone. It's the size it is and the temperature it is, and in June that temperature makes your ankles ache within a minute. I stood in it anyway, up to my shins, until I couldn't feel my feet, and then I sat on a rock and let them come back.

On Friday we drove down to Canal Park because a freighter was due in, and we stood on the pier like tourists while it came under the bridge and the horns went back and forth. My father used to say you could tell which engineer was on watch by how a boat came in. I don't know if that was true. My mother held my arm the whole time, and neither of us said anything about him, and both of us were thinking it.

The rest of it has been small. Groceries. Her friends, carefully, outdoors. Walleye. A long argument about whether the porch needs painting, which it does. I sleep in my old room under the same quilt and wake up at five because the sun comes up so early here, and I don't mind.

I fly back next Saturday. I'm trying not to count.

This is the second Mother's Day in a row my mother and I have spent on the phone. I minded the first one less than I minded this one, which surprised me, until I worked out why. Last year there was no end to it in sight. This year there is.

I had my second shot on Tuesday, at a pharmacy on Broadway, from a pharmacist who was so tired she called me "sweetheart" and then apologized for it. I spent Wednesday on the couch with a sore arm and a fever that felt like the flu's younger brother, and I was happy about every minute of it. Two more weeks and I'm done.

My mother has been done since February. She has been very gracious about not mentioning it more than twice a call.

On Friday I booked a flight. Seattle to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to Duluth, the little plane I've been afraid of since I was twelve and will be afraid of again in June, gladly. I'll have been away from home for eighteen months by the time it lands. I've never gone a year without seeing her before, let alone a year and a half.

I sent the usual card for today, and a letter with it, because she taught me that a card alone doesn't count as writing to someone. This year I also folded a printout of the itinerary inside. She tells me it's on the refrigerator, under the magnet shaped like a freighter that has held up every important piece of paper in that kitchen since 1990.

We talked for an hour and a half this morning. Mostly about the garden, and a book she didn't like, and whether I should bring a sweater in June, which in Duluth is a real question. Near the end she said, "Well. Four weeks," and then neither of us said anything for a while, which on the phone is very expensive silence and was worth it.

I read Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel this week, Klara and the Sun, over two evenings, the second of which went much later than it should have.

Klara is an Artificial Friend, a kind of machine sold as a companion for children. When the book opens she's in a shop window, watching the street and learning what she can about people from the way they pass by. A girl named Josie chooses her, and most of the rest of the book is Klara in Josie's house, paying attention. That's what she does. She watches, she tries to understand, she tries to help, and she gets things wrong in ways that are hard to read.

I won't say what happens. It came out three weeks ago, and some of you will want it fresh. I'll only say that Ishiguro does the thing he always does, where a narrator tells you everything plainly and you understand more than she does, and that I don't think anyone else alive could have written it.

What I keep coming back to isn't the plot. It's how much I cared about her. I've written characters whose whole job is to be on the player's side, and I know how it's done: the small attentions, the patience, the way they bring up something you said an hour ago. I know where the strings are. I could see them in Klara too, every one. It didn't help at all.

I finished it on Thursday night and sat for a while afterward with the lamp on, not reading anything. I'm still not sure what I was feeling, or I am, and I'd rather not write it down. It's been a long year of rooms with one person in them. Maybe that's all it was.

Have you read it? Did it leave you sitting with the lamp on too?