My father's family lost everything in the Great Depression. His earliest memories were of moving out of the mansion into successively smaller houses. My mom is

My father's family lost everything in the Great Depression. His earliest memories were of moving out of the mansion into successively smaller houses. My mom is the daughter of refugees who often went hungry in their early years in the US. When I was growing up in the 80s, we lived in relatively wealth, but I thought we were poor. We had economizing rituals that are laughable in retrospect: we'd save everything including used tin cans, we would share a single teabag for making tea at breakfast, nothing ever got replaced if it could be fixed (Dad still keeps an 1980s-era microwave working, although over the years he's had to replace half the components on the main board). My parents' house is now probably worth millions. They had careers and have savings and are living out a very comfortable retirement. There's a house full of stuff that I'll have to deal with one day. It will be hard, but I will try to look at it as a meditation on the challeneges they went through and how they coped. I expect one of the hardest parts to be books. I was raised to think of books as practically sacred. Every inch of the house is stacked deep in books: art books, science books, old books, mass market books ... Libraries might want 1% of them, but they'd sell the others at fundraisers for a nickel or maybe just send them off to be pulped. There's also my dad's old computer stuff. I think there's a PDP-11 rotting in the garage. When I was a kid, there was a big old analog computer out there. I suspect these will be re-homable.