When I was a child it was not unusual for strangers to show up at our breakfast table during such times — sleepy-eyed and grateful truck drivers whom my dad and brothers had made welcome when they couldn’t make it back to their own homes. My mother always had enough food for them, and she filled their thermoses with hot coffee when they headed back out on the road. Later, I married into a family that owned truck stops and became involved in the truck-stop side of a trucker’s life. I saw how intricate and far the web of support for individuals reached.

In the past 40-plus years I’ve “held down the fort” again and again in the face of some bizarre situations. This situation though, this pandemic, has me rattled. I’ve always felt kinship with military families; now that kinship seems real and immediate. It feels like we’re living in a country on the cusp of something not unlike war, the enemy clinging to our skin, coming for us wherever we gather, slipping into our homes and making no distinctions about what side of anything we’re on.

Experts are telling us what we can expect in the coming weeks, though in truth it’s hard to imagine it happening here as it happened elsewhere — or happening at all. A pandemic is the stuff of history to my mind. We are all hoping we will be spared, that our precautionary measures keep us and our loved ones safe and well. I don’t know what the coming weeks will bring. I think about my ancestors, my grandmother, of course, but my grandfather as well, who received his draft notice just before the flu hit — the world’s war come to their door, followed almost immediately by the almost unimaginable terror of a virus no one understood.

I try to draw strength from the stories not only of their survival, but also of their community, of the people who kept doing the necessary work even though they knew the danger, who did their best to keep others safe and fed, and who held their place in the world until they could return to it. In frightening times like these I find solace in knowing there are still people like that in the world, heroes who look like regular people, just doing their jobs.

Karen Gettert Shoemaker (@kss516) is the author of “The Meaning of Names,” a novel set during the flu pandemic of 1918.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.