~ Shelves packed with books lining the walls (some that have been rifled through by three generations of grubby little kid hands).
~ Love letters carefully saved from great, great, great grandparents.
~ Yearbooks with notes written by friends from decades ago.
~ Albums full of baby photos of 7+ kids. Crayon drawings, paintings, and lumpy little ceramic projects that made us cringe as adults.
~ Handmade masks and art and home wares from living in Japan, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Micronesia.
~ My mother’s wedding dress framed on her bedroom wall.
~ A garden lovingly tended to every weekend by my dad when he was home.
~ A tiny denim jacket fit for a precocious little girl decorated with pins and patches from her uncle.
~ A little boy’s AC/DC poster, AC/DC t-shirt, and electric guitar, and another boy’s new laptop with the games he’d learned to code himself.
~ Pictures of my dad from when he awkwardly modeled suits in Japan.
~ My grandfather’s letters to his mother from the orphanage where he lived during the depression.
~ Our baby teeth and hair clippings from our first haircuts that my mother kept in little envelopes and carried with her overseas so many times.
~ Not everything in a home is “just stuff,” and it will take a while to process everything that was lost.
