Just last week, my thoroughly ­organized wife announced, “OK, people. Now hear this. It’s time to finally focus our attention on the garage and get that place cleaned out and shaped up for good.”

The minute I heard this directive, I fetched one of my 738 different golf caps and headed straight for the golf course, leaving the poor dogs to fend for themselves.

Our garage is the domestic equivalent of Dante’s fourth realm of the underworld, a dim and quiet place where a host of family possessions, fractured antiques and possible ­heirlooms and general junk exist in a kind of domestic Limbo Land, neither here nor there, waiting for God knows what to happen, a clutter of boxes serving no particular function other than to remind us that you may not be able to take it with you, but you can certainly put off dealing with it by keeping the door shut.

Three years ago, when we put our house up for sale in Maine and started preparing for the big move to Southern Pines, I was astonished to discover all the stuff we’d accumulated over the years. Some of it had found its way from parents downsizing their own lives and households — a few legitimate antiques, a great old wing chair here, a beloved side table there, dusty books, ­heirloom dishes, peculiar paintings.

Most of it had no real ­monetary value, only perceived sentimental attachment to our individual histories. Figuring that he who travels light ­travels best, not counting my 738 different golf caps and few thousand essential books, over the course of a checkered 30-year journalism career that had led me to a variety of living places in several major East Coast cities before finally depositing me on a dirt road in Maine, I’d taken an almost Buddhist pride in collecting as little as possible on the hoof.

Or so I’d laughably convinced myself. Imagine my shock when I realized exactly the opposite was the case. Following days of backbreaking labor hauling an endless stream of stuff down from our attic and the rooms of my office over our three-car-size garage, my wife the organizing dynamo granted me a hall pass to vanish for the day while she conducted the mother of all yard sales on a lovely May morning.

“I know you won’t want to part with half these things,” she said. “But we really do need to let this stuff go — including all the golf hats.”

“They’re golf caps,” I corrected her, pointing out that they more or less described my geographical travels through the wide world of golf over a 20-year period.

“Wonderful,” she said — somewhat ruthlessly, I later decided. “Maybe you should keep a few of your favorites, just for the swell memories.”

When I glanced back, our ­driveway looked as if half a dozen migrant families might be about to inhabit our house. I asked myself two questions on the spot — “Where on earth did all that stuff come from?” and “Where on earth should it go?”

‘Dislocations of Our Souls’

Is there an afterlife for the objects of our once and future affections? That’s why when I heard about Lisa Tracy’s new memoir, “Objects of Our Affection — Uncovering My Family’s Past, One Chair, Pistol, and Pickle Fork at a Time,” I knew I wanted to read this book and maybe meet the author.

The story relates Tracy’s unexpected odyssey into her own family’s past life when, after her mother’s death a decade ago, she and an older sister were faced with the inevitable task of disposing of several households’ worth of accumulated furniture and memorabilia from their family home in Lexington, Va.

As pretty much the sole ­surviving daughters of a ­distinguished military family that stretched back to the founding of the Republic, Tracy — a ­veteran journalist and ­former design editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer — and her older sister, Jeanne, embarked on the challenge of settling on a plan of action to deal with their family’s most cherished possessions by packing them away for years in a storage bin.

“Because we Americans are such a nomadic people,” she remarked the other afternoon after dropping into my somewhat cluttered office at PineStraw magazine to chat about her book — and a phenomenon that will largely ­confront all baby boomers or their children at some point or another — “we are a nation of pack rats. Our material objects not only come to define us, but also seem to give us a kind of comfort for the journey. As I say in the book, we are our clutter, and it is us.”

Tracy pointed out to me that the average American family moves 11 times in the course of its life, and according to the Self Storage Association, the trade industry that benefits from our inability to let things go, we spend $20 billion ­annually just storing away prized possessions, family furniture and general junk until — well, we can figure out what the heck to do with it.

“This tells me that there is an unconscious dislocation in our souls, an addiction to our things, a spiritual and emotional longing to hang on to our pasts and keep a sense of time and place by simply accumulating stuff,” Tracy explained. “Our possessions become so important because they tell us where we’ve been. They speak to us of our own histories. Thus many of us carry our possessions with us like a snail shell.”

Too Many Moves

Lisa Tracy’s own particular family unit — born from a ­tradition of military officers and wives stretching back ­multiple generations on two sides — moved no fewer than 19 times before she and her sister grew up and moved away.

The grand old house their mother inherited from her ­parents, emblematic of the family’s remarkable history of service in foreign conflicts and faraway outposts, eventually became a kind of family museum, home to everything from 130 rose medallion Canton china luncheon plates to a beloved red armchair believed to have once been sat in by George Washington.

“In this sense,” Tracy writes movingly of her own quest to honorably dispose of and make sense of what remained, ­“military families carry the essence of our history as a nation of nomads, and what is left of the households that accompanied them on their travels bears ­witness to their lives — occasionally, slyly, ­letting drop a new tidbit, a clue, a previously undisclosed piece of the puzzle. The items in those bins in Virginia represented our last best chance of getting to know who they were, these ancestors both immediate and remote.”

What began as an organizing exercise to prepare her family’s vast accumulated goods for a large estate sale auction evolved into an unexpected and ultimately rewarding exploration of the unseen ties that bind our families across the decades — in other words, the things we preserve to pass along to those who follow.

In Tracy’s case, even as objects were being inventoried and assessed for either sale or personal keeping, opening a long-closed chest from the days of a distinguished forebear’s service in China’s Boxer Rebellion or working her way through providentially preserved family documents proved to be an illuminating path into her family’s ­distinguished but complicated past, full of hardship and unspoken tragedies — not to mention a powerful glimpse of the ­acquisitive values of an emerging capitalist nation.

I won’t give away too much of the story’s poignant and surprising revelations (hint: it involves old-fashioned dueling pistols) because in a place like The Pines, where estate sales appear on the classified pages of The Pilot every weekend and someone on the block is always in a state of downsizing their lives or that of an aging parent, this gem of a book will powerfully resonate with many and probably inspire a great deal of spiritual trunk-searching — and not simply in hopes of scoring a windfall from “The Antiques Roadshow.”

A Community Sale?

It would make a great community read, perhaps inspire a mass community yard sale. In the meantime, as I slowly read the book, I idly wondered if it might be true that we are what we choose to keep from the accumulations of many lifetimes.

I wanted to know from Lisa Tracy (who only chose to keep her family’s George Washington chair and a lacquered side table plus a few kitchen items) what conclusions she may have reached about this particular time in our national American life. It is a time when, following a decade of war and economic collapse, for the moment at least, conspicuous consumption seems to be finally in retreat.

“Many of us grew up children of an affluence that’s really no longer sustainable,” she said. “The first Gilded Age in America was a time when the quality and abundance of one’s material possessions were viewed as a measure of one’s standing in society. Then came war and depression and social change, the Vietnam conflict, the women’s movement, ­significant social changes in the American family, and so forth.”

Tracy thinks we are just now emerging from a second Gilded Age that began after the Second World War, when technology and convenience merged and the idea of ­material wealth became something so many Americans strived for.

“Now,” she added, “so many of us are downsizing to find a sustainable level of life yet somehow hold on to those things that tell us the story of who we are and where we came from. How do we reconcile materialism in a world where resources are shrinking? I don’t have an answer to that. What I hope I see emerging is a new sense of ­community, a shared sense of our belonging to our chosen places and to each other.”

She smiled at me. “I hope the future will be much less about greed and material things,” she said, “and far more about sharing ideas that make our lives even deeper and more meaningful.”

As she points out in “Objects of Our Affection,” “The little things bear witness to how quickly drastic change takes place.”

During one of the more touching encounters with her late mother’s possessions, Tracy reluctantly opened a box labeled “Kitchen Things” and “kissed several hours goodbye wrestling with memories and stewardship.” Old cookbooks, dented double-boilers, wooden spoons with peeling painted wooden handles — all ­ultimately found their way to a second-hand kitchen shop. It was nice to think, as she put it, that they would have a “second life” serving someone else.

“And then I came to the salt,” she writes. “Somewhere near the bottom of the box was the kitchen salt shaker, an unpretentious glass container with a dented aluminum cap. It had always sat on the stove, its ­pepper-shaker mate long lost or broken.”

The salt shaker shook her. “It touched her hands,” she said. “She ate of it. It is a last, and very concrete yet so ephemeral thread connecting me to the woman who brought me into this world I now inhabit.”

Needless to say, Tracy kept her mother’s salt shaker. And after reading her lovely book, I went home determined to ­finally confront the boxed-up clutter that came South with us from Maine. So, I guess, this weekend we may finally get to it.

Sure hate to see all those golf caps finally go, I’ll admit. May keep a few dozen on the sly, just to tell me all the great places I’ve been in life.

Best-selling author Jim Dodson, Sunday essayist with The Pilot and editor of PineStraw magazine, can be contacted at jim@thepilot.com.