The cheapest item in a cleared house can be the hardest one to leave behind.

Value and attachment run on separate scales. When a house is being emptied, the furniture and the jewellery get decided by rules about worth and fairness, and then somebody stalls over a chipped mug or a wooden spoon. That object is where the ordinary days lived, the ones nobody thought to record, which is exactly why it holds more than the things with a price.

If you are clearing a house, allow yourself to keep something that makes no sense to anyone else. It takes almost no room, and nobody has to be persuaded that it was the right choice.