With few exceptions my grandmother’s house is totally preserved from the thirty years she lived here. I am the only person to have lived here since she left.

As sad as this sounds, whenever I remove something from its place, I neatly return it when I’m done. I put all the dishes back where they have always been. I put photo albums back in their boxes. I keep her pens in the same place.

I used her measuring tape the other day, which was wrapped in a rubber band, and when I was finished I wrapped the rubber band back around it and put it in the drawer where it belongs.

No one is ever going to come back for these things or even notice that I’m doing this. I don’t even notice what I’m doing when I’m doing it. I guess I just have this deep-rooted respect for this place and for how organized my grandmother always was with her things.