I love reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, only partly because it’s a nice way of dealing with a surfeit of possessions, but mostly because it gives me a glimpse into a different culture, a culture that sees a spiritual essence in the objects that share our lives. People think Marie Kondo is about throwing things out. No, she’s focused on keeping the things that really matter to us. She tells her readers to take their possessions one by one and ask, “Does this spark joy?” and if it does, no matter how ridiculous it is, you should keep it.

I decided last night that I should go through my bin of treasures one more time. I was keeping the bin in the basement, but I have realized that the basement (dry and spacious as it is after a few years of decluttering) is not a good place for my possessions to live. I should just have the cat litter pan down there, along with my tools and hardware. I really have to store my artificial Christmas tree in the basement and all the ornaments, too. And I hang my clothes to dry in the basement. But it’s more like a garage than a room. It’s not a place for things that weigh on my mind.

So I brought the bin upstairs and took everything out. My adult kid’s christening slippers are in there, and the sweater I knit for them (and that the grandchild wore briefly). Also, three of my kid’s wisdom teeth, a bottle full of black pebbles from New Zealand, and another bottle full of the quartz pebbles called Cape May Diamonds. I have several silver objects (a baby spoon, the silver shell I was baptized with, a mug with family names engraved on it, and a bunch of teaspoons). I’m keeping all of that except the teaspoons, because every one of those things means something. Each one has a spirit.

There is jewelry in the bin, and that is harder to define: An old-fashioned amethyst pendant someone in my family owned. My. great-grandmother’s wedding ring. Several thin gold chains from one of those kiosks at the mall. A small plastic bag with some gold earrings I don’t wear. A few silver items my husband gave me; he tended to buy things I didn’t like, but I liked a few and I have kept those. I am annoyed by most of the jewelry, which I never wear, and I should take it all to someone who will give me a few hundred dollars for the gold.

My wedding ring was in there, too, and I put it back on my hand. I got the funeral director to take my husband’s wedding band off his hand (I don’t want to know how, as my husband had big knuckles and couldn’t get the band off when he was alive), and I wore it for a while, but it slipped off and was lost.

There was also a little box in that bin with my husband’s other cherished possessions in it, too: a keychain for a VW Rabbit, a keychain for a Jaguar, an engraved Zippo lighter I gave him for his first AA anniversary, and an engraved pocket watch I gave him for our wedding anniversary. A bunch of cufflinks. A plain wooden cross, which I will donate. I looked at all of those things and they didn’t “spark joy,” as Marie Kondo says about things you should keep. No, they sparked a sort of vague sorrow. Each one of those things has a story attached to it, and I don’t like stories that end with, “and then he died, and his memories died with him.”

I might get his little possessions framed in a shadow box and hang them on the stair wall, above the banister. That way, their spiritual essences would have a chance to dissipate into the atmosphere, instead of being crammed into a little dark wooden box. And after a while of walking up the stairs past them, I bet they would lose their punch and just turn into little objects, like my great-grandmother’s wedding ring, or into a sort of poem, like a Cornell box, as Robert Pinsky wrote. A container of significant things, speaking for themselves.