A suitcase’s old labels record journeys its present contents cannot explain.

Objects accumulate a history that has nothing to do with what they hold now. Old labels record a route, a year, a person who packed differently and travelled for reasons that have since ended, and none of that is legible from the shirts inside today. The same is true of houses, of scars, of the odd habits families keep. Present function explains very little of what a thing has been.

Pick up something old that you use ordinarily and ask what it did before you. If someone still alive knows the answer, that is a conversation worth having sooner rather than later.