There's no clean break when you're cleaning out a grown kid's room

You're either a saver or a tosser. Your instinct says, "Hold on, it might be useful for a future moment of sentimental recollection," or you stuff it in the trash, because, really, what are you going to do, look at it and get misty and then throw it away? No, you'll still save it, because it gave you a little nostalgic reverie, and in the future you might be nostalgic for the time this thing made you nostalgic.

My wife is ruthless about these things. It is impossible to describe how little ruth she has. Savers marry tossers, just as "get to the airport three hours early" people marry people who start to pack around the time Zone 1 passengers are boarding. So she was pleased when I, a saver, decided to clean out Daughter's room. Too soon, I'd always thought. But it's been half a decade.

At some point, every empty-nester faces the difficult task of strenuous winnowing of your child's left-behind items. If you don't, it looks like a shrine to childhood, a frozen state of late adolescence. All the things you were, that made you who you are, arrayed on shelves. The reminders of friends who faded away, brief fancies, hobbies that cooled, high school days that seemed so fraught and dramatic at the time and now seem like a lark, a stroll.

The trick is to declutter without removing the essence, the personality. You can't editorialize, choosing items that suggest the things the parents approved or preferred. Not all the Harry Potter books, but one. Not all the snow globes, but one from a place she went alone. The notebooks are set aside, even though there's only a few pages of writing and sketches. Not your call.

The jewelry in the drawers goes into a box — so many small bright things, so many pins and chains and earrings, all tangled together, waiting for the moment when they strike her eye again.

You pick up some gilded thing, a pin with a saucy saying, an object of obscure provenance that must have had meaning to earn pride of place on a shelf, and it speaks to an inner life you couldn't know, a wealth of stories never related.

You know she got this pin in Japan, but what was the day like? The sounds of the street outside the shop, the smell of the restaurants, the emotions of being on the other side of the world, the pride at speaking the language and counting out the right amount of coins? That's one object. There are a hundred.

Away in a box, filed in the basement, next to the box of things your parents saved for you. Next to the box of things that belonged to your parents. A private Smithsonian, three generations in three bins, perhaps a curse to be dragged from here to there until it's dispersed to the antique stores, where it's relieved of all meaning and finds a new home.

If it truly meant something, you think, they would have taken it — but no, they struck out for terra incognito and wanted to travel light. They trusted you to safeguard the evidence of childhood, and so you save instead of toss.

My father was a tosser, but he saved his childhood baseball uniform. The Harwood Hawks, a North Dakota team in the late 1930s. It has no use; it takes up space in a bin in the storage closet. It's not the first thing I'd try to save in a fire, but I'll never toss it. Someday Daughter will find it and remember him, whom she loved.

And then she'll let it go, because the moment of remembering was the end of it. He'd be happy to know she was the one who sent it into the antique-store stream.

I guess this is a roundabout way of telling Daughter that I gave away all her Hello Kittys, and when she reads this she'll know it was inevitable.

And also, she will know: I saved one.