I looked at this topic from a couple of different directions, and discussed it with my husband, who actually has had to save things from a fire. We live in an area of Southern California where wildfires are, unfortunately, not rare, and he and his family had to evacuate their home due to a nearby fire threat several years ago. They were able to return safely and their house wasn’t damaged, but was still understandably upsetting.
In the case of a fire threat from outside, like that one, we agreed you’d probably have enough warning to get things together and leave the area that you’d probably try to save a lot more than ten things – you might be haphazard about it due to the stress and the rush, but you’d probably load your car with as much as possible before making your getaway. On the other hand, if you had to escape a house fire, we thought you’d most likely be in such a hurry to get out that you wouldn’t get the chance to save anywhere near ten things – and when we thought about what we’d put on that list, we came up short.
Family members didn’t make the list, because they didn’t need to – that’s just a given. Also, family members include pets, so the dog’s not on the list either.
Our “non-living” priorities would probably be:
- Wallets – ID, credit cards, cash. Grab ’em. (I keep my whole purse right by the door, so assuming we could get out that way, I’ve got that one covered.)
- Glasses and contact lenses – without these, I won’t be able to find any of the things I’d want to save!
- Cell phones – we’d need to be able to contact people.
- Computer – We actually have two, but the most important stuff is on my husband’s iMac, and there’s no way he’d leave without it. If he had time, he’d probably get the backup hard drive too, but we actually keep that in a fire safe, so it might be OK there. (My Dell PC could end up a casualty, however. Oh well…)
- Keepsakes – my son’s baby box and our wedding album
- As many photo albums as we could grab
- Clothes – jackets, shoes, and underwear especially, but more if we had time
I could probably stretch this to come up with more, but depending how little time there was, things further down the list would fall off it anyway, and when it comes down to it, most of what we have is replaceable – except for our loved ones. And I really hope this never turns out to be anything more than a thought exercise for my family.
So you are going to despise me, and possibly this is just because I never had children, but I could never see the point of saving photo albums in a fire.
I mean, how often do we look at our photo albums? Photos are just things. Memories are in your mind.
I am willing to be convinced otherwise!
WG – We actually have so many pictures on the computer that we could re-print a lot of them and make new albums, which is one reason the computer must be saved! The wedding album is special, though, and the baby book is 23 years old and the memories are a little foggy sometimes. :-).
But I think that what people put on lists like this are the things they consider absolutely essential and/or irreplaceable, which is why they so often mention photo albums. Granted, we may not look at them often, but we could if we wanted to. But I suspect that as more of us keep digital photos, we’ll be saving the computers instead of the albums.
That’s true—there’s the “irreplaceable” aspect. Most tangible items can be re-acquired.
At one point in my life I pretty much let go of all my worldly goods. Friends urged me to keep things, and I did in the end keep (and store, for many years) four boxes of stuff.
When my life became so that I could unpack the stuff—I looked at it and thought, Why on earth did I keep all this?
This includes the one photo album! Possible I am just not the sentimental type.