On my son's last visit, he sorted through all his belongings that have been sitting in my tiny, cramped house for years, waiting for the day when he would have a home large enough to put them in. Now he has one, and wonder of wonders, it has an attic. He's never had an attic before, never spent hours on a rainy day looking through dim clues to a mysterious past. But someday his children will, and they will be blessed.

You see, one of the things our professional organizers forget when they tell us to strip our lives of clutter is that it's filled with pieces of our lives, hints about who we are and how we got to be that way. Sit us down with some of the things we haven't really looked at in years, and we will tell you stories we'd almost forgotten. That clutter can reintroduce us to our family, tell us things we never knew or only suspected about them.

In the attic I spent so many hours of my childhood in, I found photographs of my mom looking impossibly young, and my dad looking unbelievably callow -- the utter self-assurance I always saw in him had not developed yet. It made me wonder. Could it be that when he proposed to my mother, he knew he was making the biggest gamble of his life, betting that he'd be able to support a wife and children? Could it be that he had just the teensiest doubt that he'd be able to do it?

There were photos of him and my mom competing together in tennis tournaments before I was born (though my brother and sister, maybe five and six, could be seen scurrying around, picking up the stray balls). What happened to them? When did they stop competing, stop caring? Was it the war that changed things, or moving away from their family and friends? Was it that my other brother and I came along? Was it just too hard to live that life once they had four children?

There were lots of photos of oddly dressed children who I learned were my grandparents and uncles and aunts. How odd. Had the ancient, wrinkled faces and comfortable laps I knew really started out just as little and ignorant as we were? It was hard to believe. And could it mean that someday I too would be as wrinkled and gray, with a comfortable lap of my own?

The attic was full of papers and documents, too. It's how I came to understand that a fourth child, like me, is never as special as the first. There were birth certificates and baby books and report cards galore for my oldest brother and sister, and piles upon piles of their childish art work, stories, poems and school assignments, but there were very few for me. When the time came to find my birth certificate so that I could claim my first legal drink, there wasn't one for me in the attic. There was only a hospital record with my footprint (which the bartender found unpersuasive even when I offered to show him my bare foot).

There were private papers, too, ripe with stories and hints that people I thought I knew had secret lives and private beliefs unvoiced in public. I read my uncle's letters from his service in England in World War II, and wondered what exciting military secrets he'd revealed in the bits blacked out by the censors. I read my sister's forgotten adolescent diaries, even though I knew perfectly well they were never meant to be unlocked. (It's true, incidentally, that eavesdroppers never hear anything good about themselves; my sister was too kind to have told me what an annoying child I was, but she told her diary about it in minute detail.)

The attic was also a wonderland of books. So was the rest of the house, to be sure -- the Oz books had a place of honor downstairs, where our mom and dad would read them aloud to us. But the attic books were my parents' forgotten books, many of them leftover from their own childhoods at the very beginning of the century. I snuggled in with them. With the lightbulb dangling from a chain in the ceiling, and the sound of the rain on the roof so near my head, I read about Osa Johnson, the ordinary small-town girl who married an explorer and pioneer of wildlife photography, and spent her life traipsing around Africa and living among its exotic people. The attic was a fitting place to read Jane Eyre for the first time, and Little Women, The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, and all the Anne of Green Gables books.

Then there were the clothes, oh, my, the clothes! The attic was a treasure trove for dress up: poodle skirts and prom dresses and bobby sox and hats. They must once have been the latest thing, chic and stylish, but by the time I discovered them in trunks that hadn't been opened in years, they looked indescribably silly -- they really wore THAT?

And there were the mementoes. I had no way of knowing what private meanings were attached to them, so I made up my own stories about those carefully preserved movie tickets, pressed flowers, souvenir snow cones, posters, doodles and scrawled notes that maybe some special boy passed in school when the teachers weren't looking.

There were old toys, too, and unfinished sewing projects, dishes and pots and canning jars, tools and appliances that didn't work anymore. I played with some, and wondered about the others (did my mother really once put up her own preserves?). Inconsequential things, I suppose, but still, they were once the stuff of daily life, leftovers that hinted of how my family lived before newer ways of doing things sent them to the attic.

Even by my relatively slovenly standards, the attic was a mess -- dusty, cobwebby, and filled with teetering piles of disorganized clutter. If it was in my tiny house, where I covet every single inch of space, I'd call it clutter, if I felt like being polite, a pile of crap if I didn't. I'd be really tempted to obey the cardinal rule of decluttering: if you haven't used it for a year, get rid of it.

But if I did, I'd be throwing away history and mystery that my children and grandchildren might otherwise discover and treasure.

Not for nothing is the Smithsonian Institution fondly known as "the nation's attic," because it preserves the kind of clutter we're urged to discard, the cultural flotsam and jetsam that traces our history. But it can't possibly keep every family's mementoes and memories, nor can the rest of our nation's historical societies and museums and libraries.

So declutter if you must. But if you're lucky enough to have an attic, keep some of that old junk around, so that your children can explore it -- and discover you.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.