Widowed three years ago, she chose to continue living in her home, shouldering its care and keeping. For nearly 40 years, she and her husband raised their children, built their dreams and lived a full life in that home. He passed long after all the kids were married and gone. Alone, she was the sole possessor of this precious place, this home filled with all the family experiences and memories.

Believing that, she fiercely maintained it by herself. But that’s a lot of square feet of floors and ceilings and walls to care for, of lawns to mow, flower beds to plant, trees to prune and a large garden to cultivate alone. The solitary maintenance began to wear her down.

After several exhausting years of lonely work, she began to realize the memories aren’t in the floors or flower beds, the ceilings or trees, the walls or lawns. “The memories are in me,” she shared. So she took the big step, put her house up for sale and began packing. She asked me to help her. I’m glad she did. It made me realize how much stuff I have, and how much I need to pass along.

My mother’s journey was similar. She and Dad built their dream home on land that had been in Dad’s family for generations. They enjoyed many decades of good living there. Then Dad passed, and Mom was left alone. Like my sister, she believed the good memories were embedded in the house, so she stayed. And like my sister, maintaining that large house and property wore her down.

But Mom knew she would move from that place years before she actually did. So her downsizing efforts were thoughtful and orderly. She eventually discarded the bulk of everything she and Dad accumulated, sold the house to my brother and moved into a home in a 55-plus community: no yard work, no snow shoveling, and just enough room to house her and her remaining, carefully selected things.

Ironically, a decade later, Mom chose to move to an assisted living setting. She now lives in a cozy room with a separate bathroom, small kitchenette and bedroom. Her small “home” is a haven of comfort and peace, not an obligated site to maintain for the sake of the family.

Interestingly, what Mom chose to take with her were loads of memory-preserving pictures. Generations of family group pictures hang on her walls and photo albums take up precious space. They give her more joy and relief than her empty house ever did.

Years ago, I participated in a weeklong wilderness trek where we reenacted the experiences of the pioneers pulling handcarts across the plains. We lived out of a knapsack the size of a 5-gallon bucket. Every possession, including bedding and clothing, had to fit into that container. It was a reality eye-opener of which possessions actually do and do not matter.

Every now and then, I feel a longing to pull out a 5-gallon bucket and see what I could fit into it, see what I could live on. This happens especially when I’m feeling saturated by our overly materialistic world.

My wise mom and sister now know that our memories don’t live in a house. We house them. They live in us. Wherever we go, they are with us. We shift our maintenance efforts from keeping the house to keeping the memories, keeping in our hearts and minds what really matters. We begin to realize we are the critical link to the next generation, not in where we live but in what lives in us.

It’s probably past time to start unloading stuff and start loading memories.

D. Louise Brown lives in Layton. She writes a biweekly column for the Standard-Examiner.