The weight of possessions

This is the view over the city from our walk today. We'd spent some of the morning packing up twenty large supermarket bags full of books from my parents' flat - those "bags for life" that hold really quite a lot. Then we'd added four or five bagfuls from our house and, in the afternoon, put them in a cellar beneath a New Town flat where books are collected for the Christian Aid sale in a town church in May. It all involved quite a lot of stairs.
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Quite a few of these were gifts that we'd given my parents for Christmas: books on antiques or reminiscences of the war years for my mother and on music or science for my father. Many were full of nice pictures and therefore very large and heavy. I regretted not giving them chocolates instead.
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It's very sobering, this packing up of someone else's life. We came home and looked at our own very many books and wondered how long we would live and if we could calculate when it would be good to give them away.
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Mr Life tends to buy books that he reads once and will never read again and so he often does pass them on to charity shops. (I exclude railway books from this generalisation.) But I do reread mine and cherish them. However, the question is: is there any realistic hope of rereading them all even once - and also reading the many new books that come out every year and that I also want to read - before I die?

Ah well. Meanwhile we enjoyed a bit of fresh air. This is Moray Place, a very desirable crescent near the centre of town but with no through traffic and with a private garden in the middle. If I were to live in a flat in town, it would be here. Well, actually it wouldn't because we couldn't afford it. And anyway I don't want to live in a flat. But Moray Place might tempt me.
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I'm determined that we're not going to do to our children what my parents have done to us: stay on too long in a too-big house full of too many things and leave the offspring with the problems: furniture, photos, ornaments, pictures, memorabilia. But it's hard to work out the timing. Ideally, you should reduce your effects to a minimum just before you no longer have the capacity to do so by yourself. It would be sad but, I hope, a bit liberating. But when? Ah, that's the question.
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It's so cheering, all this talk of death. I like to spread sunshine.