things = memories?

the first dumpster load of "stuff" from our burnt and smoked out house is loaded and ready for the landfill...what does that say about my environmental "native perennial species" gardening pretensions? so much for movement away from the consumerist/disposable society...most of my house has become as disposable as a closed big box store...true i am salvaging what i can in the way of books and cds and dvds...but they will end up as disposable eventually...when the owner dies or technology renders them obsolete ( like the boxes of vhs tapes stacked up int he living room...keep or pitch? how do you recycle them? )and no-one but some nostalgia freak wants them...i'm still tied down by "stuff" in more ways then i am prepared to admit apparently...time to rethink my position, motivation, and the assessment framework i'm using to evaluate what i am doing... lots of memories in there" someone said yesterday and i thought how important could a memory be if it had to be indexed by an artifact? wouldn't some important memory stand alone? independent of anthropogenic "stuff"? why would it need a memory jog? seems to me the last thing it would need would be some token...but symbols seem so important to people in their self-definitions ( not to mention their definition of "others"...yellow stars of david have made me wary of symbols for a long time...political symbolism is shorthand the makes actual thought unnecessary...another reason to seriously question anything politicians say...inattentiveness can kill you) and even if a thing is attached to a memory, what is a memory? when you remember are you remembering an actual event or person or are you just remembering the last time you remembered it? is that why human memory cn be so fallible?