Years ago, a dear friend said to me, “Three moves are as good as a fire.” She was updating old Ben Franklin (“three removes as are as bad as a fire”) as I was recounting our family’s many moves. We went from California to New York and back, with a summer stop in Colorado in one year. Then, suddenly we were gone to Texas the following year. Even with three children, we didn’t accumulate a lot of stuff with all those moves. We moved twice more before settling into the farm house we’d planned as our forever home. (Spoiler alert: it was not.)

Today, that meaning feels a little out of place against the Los Angeles wildfires. People there are grateful to escape with their lives, since at least 28 have died. They lost their homes and important belongings. Some were meaningful to a single family or small group, while other items were an important part of our creative life and history. Losing things in a wildfire gives them a different meaning.

We can accumulate a lot over a lifetime. Our family started amassing stuff after we settled into the farm house, especially with hand-me-downs from the family ranch. Mark’s grandmother had moved into a nursing home and his mother invited him to go get things we needed. He drove a U-Haul out to West Texas and filled it with furniture and other household goods. I doubt his Mio and Dio were thinking “family heirlooms” when they bought that ranch oak dining set and all the bedroom suites. But inheriting those things saved us thousands of dollars.

When Mark’s Aunt Regina died, it was time to clean out another family home. She lived in that house for 70 years, inheriting and acquiring a lot and culling very little. Preparing for the estate sale was painful. Friends and family helped, but we also had to change the locks after the housekeeper walked off with the firearms. Another gal wore out her welcome rifling through the storage shed. She took many, many items that she planned to use to open an antique store. And still a junk dealer needed a crew, two full-size pickups, a cargo trailer, and an entire day to empty that shed. And I filled another U-Haul with items from the house. We loved Regina dearly and she knew how to have fun, but we really didn’t need any of the things we brought home. Suddenly, my sewing room stash looked like the haberdashery on the Great British Sewing Bee. The Christmas closet overflowed with decor, so much so that we never again displayed it all.

Then, a friend called me for the same kind of help. A mutual friend had died. His only daughter was overwhelmed by the prospect of cleaning out his house. Three of us put on our work gloves to help. His kitchen appeared to have one of every item sold at Williams-Sonoma, including a jalapeno corer. At least two booksellers went through his collection and bought hundreds of titles, leaving hundreds more behind.  It took weeks to prepare for the estate sale, including staging his late wife’s craft room like a pop-up creative reuse store. His daughter was happy to have distributed all of her father’s things in a meaningful way and still be able to pocket a few thousand dollars. But those back-to-back experiences were eye-opening.

So when the brother of my oldest friend died, I knew she’d need help. He left behind the family home with three generations of furniture, collections and heirlooms. We first met up at Round Top, Texas’s famous antiques fair, to see whether a furniture dealer would be interested, since all the pieces were gorgeous. We learned that there are trends even in the antiques world. My friend had already discovered that her brother’s massive stamp collection no longer held much value. But we were surprised to learn that something as functional as furniture was sensitive to trends, too. For example, once TVs became flat screens, people stopped buying 100-year-old armoires to hide them and started buying mid-century buffets to display them.

Eventually, my friend stopped trying to find dealers and hired an estate sale company. I drove my pickup to South Texas for several weekends to help her get ready. She brought her pickup, too, and kept track of how much we hauled to the town dump over the summer–nearly 1.5 tons of stuff from the out-buildings and the house that we knew wouldn’t sell. The estate company still worked for another month to stage everything for a weekend bender of a sale.

She took a few heirlooms back home with her. I didn’t plan on accepting, or asking, for anything. Then I stumbled on an old set of sturdy steak knives still in the box. Ours were breaking at the handle, so with my friend’s blessing, I threw that little box in the pickup and took them home.

I’ve been thinking about another friend who culled what she owned until it all fit into a couple of suitcases. The fire that rolled through her life was a metaphorical one, but her response was primal–preserving the basic human freedom to move about. In my head, the case for accumulating stuff was crumbling. The things we accumulate will likely never be worth what they cost, even in a collection. It also takes enormous effort to re-distribute all that we gather over a lifetime, a burden some of us seem to leave behind.

We all need tools, and some lives need jalapeno corers. We all need to connect to beauty, too. The things we accumulate can help make those connections, but sometimes, oftentimes, they get in the way instead. Downsizing helped us think about why we should carry something with us, bringing a newfound appreciation for the things we kept, with an even deeper meaning for the things we let go.