Cherish that bear! Thank goodness it’s safe. Insensitivity around you is terrible to hear. Why should they care? It’s yours. With emphasis.

Saving objects of note runs in my family. There was tragic loss of a child in generations past which started the process, along with many Aspie traits.

My mother devastated me my giving away my piano a few years without asking. Supposedly it’s on loan but I doubt I’ll ever see it. We’ve had serious issues where she’s made claim by seniority on family heirlooms that I’d heard were mine. In time, maybe...

I’ve cleared out a lot of my own over the years, but last week photographed and packed all my childhood dresses she had saved and I recently reclaimed for my own safekeeping. (I’m surely way older than you too!) - They don’t make handsewn velvet and appliquéd clothes like that anymore. I loved revisiting them...

I’m down to several storage shelves of bins in our basement: stuffed animals, children’s books and favorite oddball things I wrapped in archival tissue no less. I have some background in preservation - so absolutely think twice before throwing anything out! (I’m not a hoarder but a careful curator/collector and caretaker of my own stuff). I make sense of objects as much through a picture of the thing, as from the thing itself.