THE wind is rising in the eaves, making the windows shake. Beyond the garden, across the field, the Lammermuirs look bleak. From downstairs comes the rattle of stepladders, and the smell of paint. I am in my childhood bedroom, which I shared with my sister, keeping out of the decorator’s way as he touches up a ceiling stained nicotine after a leak. Next he’ll be painting the cupboard under the rafters where we used to lay mousetraps, hearing them snap like alligators during the night. When I’d tiptoe in the next morning, expecting to find a rigid little corpse, often the cheese would be nibbled but the mouse gone.

The painter’s presence is welcome, because there has been an eerie quietness about the house since my parents died. This last autumn and winter, my brother and sister and I have been here almost every week, sorting through mum and dad’s belongings, binning the catalogues piling on the doormat like a Siberian snowdrift, and tidying and cleaning in anticipation of the day when we must put the house up for sale. A secondhand bookshop in Edinburgh’s Tollcross is now a satellite of my father’s collection of Scottish books – those, that is, that none of us pounced on for ourselves. Charity shops across the county have taken delivery of boxes of clothes, crockery, and paperbacks.

Only now have I discovered my capacity to hoard. As the family home empties, my flat is filling up with pictures, trinkets and books that are like emissaries from the past. Throwing out my father’s paint-spattered hammer – which was his father’s before him – will feel like abandoning an heirloom. I suspect it will find its way into my husband’s toolbox, whether he knows it or not. Even harder to get rid of will be the reference books and maps, without which dad would have been bereft. When he died, there was a dictionary in almost every room, within reach of his chair.

My parents lived in this sandstone cottage for over half a century. Small, but with a beautiful, sun-trapping garden, it was built in the 1860s for the headmaster of the village school. This is where I was born, and where all three of us children returned to, often, after we had left. In unguarded moments, I still refer to visiting it as going home. Years ago, I came on a photo of my mother on the grass under the apple trees, smiling and pregnant. It was a reminder that I had lived here since before I can recall, that in some unfathomably important sense I am connected to this house, and its garden, and the village nearby like a bird that can find its way back to where it was hatched, no matter how great the distance.

I can’t imagine what it will feel like when a stranger’s car is in the drive, and new owners pottering in the flowerbeds and in the sheds, one where dad used to store bottles of wine, more for the pleasure of giving them away than drinking them, the other lined with garden tools and a sideboard filled with Bramleys from the autumn picking.

If the last year has taught me anything, however, it is that the things that matter most remain with us somewhere safer than in bricks and mortar, more reliable than photographs, possessions or memories. After all, a childhood home to return to in your fifties is a luxury, even a rarity. Broken relationships have seen countless households split and sold while children are young; relocating for a job or bigger family has become routine, and moving house to climb the property ladder more common still.

It makes you wonder how to define home and what the concept means. If it could only be found in tangible form, then we would all at some point feel uprooted, untethered or lost. The place where we belong is bigger than a house and smaller than our hand luggage. When the Edinburgh train crosses the Border and I sense the north approaching, I’m already home. When the plane banks over the Firth of Forth as it comes in to land, I am like Mole in The Wind in the Willows, homesickness assuaged by the familiar scene. And when I step over the door of my flat, or my parents’ empty house, I feel I have returned to myself. Yet how many homes can you have, or are they all rolled into one?

The narrator of James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room, an American living in Paris, reflects that “perhaps home is not a place but simply an irreconcilable condition”. There is a comfort and reassurance only the people and surroundings dearest to us can provide. Even when those we have loved die, their impression remains, as if imprinted upon us. Of course I know my mum and dad are gone forever, never to return. Yet they feel vividly present, occupying a bright corner of my mind where they will live for the rest of my days.

The melancholy of packing up a family home is unlike any I’ve known. In recent weeks I have seen in my brother and sister’s faces what they no doubt can see in mine: the effort not to be overwhelmed by memories, the loss of our parents made more acute each time we return, to see the emptying shell of the place shaped in their image. Shortly after mum’s last illness, a sympathetic neighbour told me that after his father died, he had to take a long detour to work each morning, so as not to drive past his house and be reminded that his childhood room was now swallowed up under an extension, a sight too sad to bear.

In a box near the table where I write, lie my mother’s last diaries. They are filled with doctor’s and dentist’s appointments, but also with her anxieties and thoughts. Will I ever be able to read them? Those years are hard enough to recall as it is, and the sight of my mother’s once impeccable handwriting growing weaker and scratchier painfully mirrors the way in which she too gradually failed. Could I throw them away? Impossible. It would be like putting the phone down on her voice.

But it is not all misery. As I hear the painter’s rollerbrush licking the walls, there is a sense that the house is eager to come back to life. At the moment it’s as if it has been holding its breath, or is waiting to be woken from sleep. In the garden daffodils and bluebells are coming into bloom, and jasmine is flowering on the walls. Soon, when the house is better polished, dusted and hoovered than our own, it will be ready to view. Showing people around will be strange, and even upsetting, but my parents would have liked the idea that the home where they were so happy, might make someone else happy too.

But for the moment, the painter is finished. I stand at the window, looking out to the hills, a view that shortly will no longer be mine. The wind is rising in the eaves. It’s time to lock up and leave.