Hopefully, you know what I mean when I say "memorabilia." You know, your adorable baby pictures and DIY scrapbooks, the souvenirs from vacations, the necklace your first boyfriend gave you on your birthday—basically anything that takes you back to a certain memory or part of your life. As humans, we like to hold on to little memory bookmarks like this to remind us of life's precious moments. We are sentimental creatures; we don't like to give up little bits of our past simply because we can't remember. So we keep memorabilia as an anchor to our past selves.

This past week, my family has been preparing my grandparents' house for an estate sale. My grandma and grandpa have recently moved into a retirement home, so they no longer have room for all their knickknacks and memorabilia. And let me tell you, they have a lot. They have boxes of old magazines, church school worksheets and their kids' homework assignments and craft projects. Practically every room in their house has at least one bookshelf overflowing with some form of literature. My grandma also keeps mentioning that she's saved her oldest daughter's umbilical cord, but doesn't remember where she put it. That'll be an interesting find.

While scavenging through all my grandparents' stuff, I can't help but think, "Wow, this is just a lot of unneeded crap." And I don't mean to think rude thoughts, but who needs five stacks of paper that only have a single line of text printed on them? Unless I find a book that interests me, I'm not all that interested in the items I find. To me, it's all just junk.

Then again, it's not my memorabilia. Those items don't hold any of my memories, don't have some deep meaning in my life. For all I know, each of those dolls could have been a precious toy of one of my grandparents' beloved children. Each broken bookend could have been from a wild trip to an exotic country. Those stacks of emails could have been heart-wrenching conversations between my grandparents and a close friend. What right do I have to compare these items to a bunch of crap?

We all have our own memorabilia, little grips that let us grasp tightly onto our memories. It does no good to judge other people for what items are personal to them. The best you can do is ask why they keep those items around and hope for a thrilling story.