Our kids came home this past December for their last Christmas in the house where they grew up. Because “kids” actually means kids plus spouses plus grandkids plus miscellaneous dogs, it was a wild rumpus, made more so by my determination that they would take away with them all childhood artifacts for which they held any attachment. Our new house, by design, has minimal storage because our hope, our intention, is to force ourselves out of our native packrat tendencies into new habits of simplicity. It’s sort of the “carry a smaller purse” principle writ large.

The kids did a good job. What they packed up, mostly, was books. The favorite early childhood storybooks, with minimal squabbling over Go Dog, Go. The high school science fiction collection for old times’ sake (or maybe for eBay). Who kept their high school yearbooks? Who consigned them to the trash? A sure measure of sentimentality, and there were no surprises. What surprised me was me, pulling odds and ends out of the trash or the Goodwill box, plaintively inquiring whether they really meant to throw them away. I guess their old grade cards and construction-paper snowflakes just didn’t mean the same to them as they did to me.

I remember going through all this with my own mother, when she and my father moved at last into their final wee retirement house. I couldn’t be bothered with my old teddy bear, my old letter sweater, my old newspaper clippings, and the clumsy artwork she had so carefully saved. But neither could my mother bear to consign them to the trash. So she employed her own creative solution: She removed a strategic board inside a closet, and stuffed all my old stuff between the walls, nailed it up, and moved on. Call it insulation. Emotional insulation.