There was a little sniffling over in Ravelry, as a young woman went to her parents’ home and sorted through her childhood room. Another Raveler commented that she has the same closet full of crap that she doesn’t know what to do with, and asked what may have been a rhetorical question:

Lots of it i have drug around for 20+ years. I wish it would just disappear, so i wouldn’t feel the guilt of ‘throwing my past away’. But really…why do we feel the need to hold onto these things?

I responded:  You answered yourself, she says from the vantage point of 53. You hold onto these things because they are your life. Good, bad, indifferent. This “crap” that we all haul around is the visual aid to our oral history. In clearing out my parents’ home, I found every birthday card my mother had ever given my father. And all the cards anyone else he loved gave him, too. I found souvenirs from their travels. I found a journal my mother had kept when she was 15. I found photos and postcards from relatives I never knew I had. We save these things to remind ourselves that we, and our friends and our families, are real. That we live and we matter.

At some point, you have to cull the herd, but you should never get rid of all of it.