The sale of my late Grandma’s house completes this week.

I imagine the new family standing in the kitchen in the same spot she’d cling to the worktop in her purple jumper, tending to vegetables in rusting pans. I wonder if they’ll look out of the window above the sink the way she did, watching – with adoration – the tiny, perfect world in its frame: inky dawn skies turning blue, small birds bathed in summer gold, vibrant flowers straining skyward. A small part of all parts, but beautiful, still. There is comfort, I think, in the way the life of that garden carries on: quietly, beautifully, reassuringly. I like knowing the seeds she planted still grow and blossom and bloom. I like the idea that the earth still bares her fingerprints.

My Grandmother’s lounge took many forms over the years. It was a place we chatted and reminisced, but it was also a ballroom; a playroom; a landscape for every adventure a curious child could imagine; a stage for the Hokey Cokey; a place impossible to leave without a smile. Her compassion spilled into every corner. I wonder if the new family will find the same solace as we did there; if they, too, will pile into that lounge the way we all did, contentedly collapsing on the carpet to eat salt-drenched chips out of paper in the sticky heat, digging a lifetime of sepia-toned photographs out of drawers to pass around. I hope so.

It strikes me they might make the spare bedroom their bedroom, and I find it strange they will never know of the magic that once existed inside of it: the stories she told me in that room; the Saturday evenings huddled close in the darkness, watching Blind Date or poring over a book passed through generations. The tender way she brushed knots out of my hair before bed and tucked me in under a bundle of knitted blankets. Midnight snacks. How she’d sit in a chair by the bed if ever thunder roared across a charcoal sky, being there for me in the fiercely gentle way she always was. My mother. My friend.

A house is just a house is just a house. Bricks and mortar. It isn’t the house, necessarily, tying a knot in my stomach, because it hasn’t felt like a home since she left it. It is that so much of who we were to each other existed inside those four walls. It is that even now – six months on – when I think of her, she is there: cocooned in her armchair; old bones and creased skin and silver hair and rose-tinted lipstick. She sits. She snacks on a small plate of her beloved blue cheese. She looks out at the world.

A loss is still a loss is still a loss. The house is evocative: a tangible connection to her. It is a treasure trove of reminders. I worry, without it to return to, I will lose the details of her reflection in the kitchen mirror as she tidied her perm; the quiet shuffle of her slippers on the carpet; the look of concentration as she studied a crossword through her magnifying glass at the dining table; how she’d stand in the window waving goodbye – smiling – until you were out of sight. I know, without the house, intricacies of these memories will be lost. Perhaps time would have stripped them anyway. The bottom line is that the initial loss gives way to endless others, which is, perhaps, the saddest part of all of it.

I’ll still drive past my Grandma’s house now and again, and I know – even as the new family cook and reminisce and play and dance and love inside – I’ll always look for her face. I suppose I’ll look in the way my Grandma looked out: with adoration. I’ll see the fading ghost of our tiny, perfect world in its frame. A small part of all parts, but beautiful, still.

And I’ll try to remember that the seeds she planted still grow and blossom and bloom, regardless. There: in the earth, and in all of us.