To throw, or not to throw

I'm currently (with the help of my brother) packing up my grandparent's house. It's been sort of a large job, and not exactly getting smaller, in addition to the fact that we don't have a lot of time in which to work. But we go over, put in a few hours here and there, and it's a pretty good system.

One thing that we've been doing, that I'm not sure my grandparents really had in mind when they suggested this job to us, is throwing away stuff. Fake flowers? Chuck them. Broken toys? Toss. Things that look odd and we don't know how to label? Adios.

Now, to our credit, we're pretty familiar with my grandparents and their wishes/tastes. When I throw things away I think 1) will they miss this? and 2) would they miss this if they knew about it? I've pretty much decided that using those two simple questions, I should be safe.

But my brother and I have had many interesting conversations about what we'd keep and throw away in our own home, should our parents pass away and leave the cleaning-out job to us. (My brother, just last night: "We'd be able to pay the property taxes, right?" For some reason that struck me as funny.) The thing is, our house has a ton of books. Loads. I don't even know what we'd do with them, or how we'd divvy them amongst our siblings, or whether we'd just pack them into storage. But my brother and I were talking about the books, most of all. The other things in our house, apparently, have almost no relevance to us. We don't like our couches, though, so they'd have to be tossed.

Anyhow, I must admit, I don't intend on ever having to sort through my parent's things, due to the rapture, but I find it interesting to take a step back and ponder what's really important, apparently, to my brother and I.

Books.

I'm not all that surprised.