This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

It was a cardboard box on a bottom shelf in our basement storage room. Judging from the dust, the container hadn't been touched in 14 years.

My son-in-law was helping us clean out the junk in preparation for our move to a new place. As he pulled out the box, a 14-year-old faded handwritten label revealed itself — "Sex Toys."

Him • "Oh my gosh. I thought you were joking about that."

Me • "I never kid about church."

This refers to Sunday's column about moving to Herriman in 2003, when I labeled our moving boxes with shocking contents so as to get a rise out of the Mormon ward members helping us.

The "sex toys" box actually contained an heirloom doll that belonged to my granddaughters' great-great grandmother on my wife's side. It brought back a lot of memories for my wife.

Moving has a way of doing that. Things you haven't seen in years come to light, bringing with them long buried memories — school papers, holiday ornaments, jewelry, clothing, pictures and so on.

If you're lucky, the memories are good ones — photos of old friends and adventures, pressed flowers from a first love, and military memorabilia.

If not — say it's a pay stub from your deadbeat ex-husband or the veil your cheating ex-wife wore when she vowed to love only you for the rest of your lives — then it can be a little difficult.

Either way, it's a double hit for us. In addition to our home in Herriman, my extended family is also cleaning out our parents' home in Holladay. We moved there in 1970. A lot of ghosts haunt that place now that we're abandoning it.

Mom and the Old Man have moved into a small apartment in a senior living place. They had truckloads of stuff to get rid of when they downsized. The last of it went on Friday.

As the house emptied, the memories insisted on remaining.

There's the patched screw holes from when I pulled the banister out of the wall while practicing stair surfing on Mom's ironing board, and a cracked windowsill from pulling a drunk Bammer inside when his father was chasing him.

From a fracture in the wall of my old bedroom, I pulled out bits of what nearly half a century ago may have been blotter acid. The ghost of a 17-year-old me suddenly appeared. "You won't know unless you try." I flushed it instead.

Even the yard has its spirits. There's a large willow tree under which I asked my wife to marry me exactly 42 years and one week ago today. There's also a shallow depression marking the grave of a good dog.

Back home in Herriman, my wife and our three daughters sorted through boxes of old decorations, choosing the ghosts of Christmases past that they remembered best. Every one of them conjured a memory.

Rummaging through boxes of my own stuff, I came across things I shouldn't have kept, including crime scene photos, a bloody police uniform shirt, a dud smoke grenade and a small box of what looks like fish line marked "stitches, 1971."

Like my parents, we're looking to downsize. We can't keep everything. We've already given away a lot — except the good memories. There's always storage space for those.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.