Actually, it’s a storage tub. In order to get our AC put in, we had to move a whole bunch of things. Scrap wood, power tools… and tubs of stuff we hadn’t looked at in 25 years. I’ve been going through those, trying to decide what we still need to keep. Among the discoveries:
High school and college yearbooks. Doodles and scribbles from high school. There’s even one of my very first attempts at a fantasy short story! (For reference, I graduated high school in 1977, so I guess those were in the tub for a lot longer than 25 years.)
There are also some old letters from family who have since passed. One of my grandmothers wrote a short biography of her early life. (The people she depended on kept dying. Also, her family had 9 kids. We forget, with modern medicine, that such things were common.)
Letters about the first fan club I wrote for, Comics Heroines Fan Club. Even a few lost loves. My first heartbreak. The first heart I broke. (He liked me a lot more than I liked him. I had to say so.) The engagement that was a wonderful disaster…
They are precious, but I’m not sure if I need to keep any of this. At my age, everything I hang onto is something that my kids will have to deal with after I pass. Certainly I’ll preserve my mother’s letters and Grandma’s biography. However, the fan correspondence won’t mean anything to my kids. And the high school annuals? Those are just too darned big.
I’m still mulling over the love letters. Not that I’m ashamed of having had boyfriends in my twenties. Nor do I have any intention of following up on old flames. My husband encourages me to save them. Maybe I will.
It’s been fun to sort through all of this. We’ll see what I end up keeping. After all, what’s a few more years in a trunk?
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Wyrmflight 
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I’m not a saver/memento person. Some people are. I guess we’re all just wired in our individual ways.
If you want to keep the memories but not take up space, there’s another option. You can scan them and save them on computer (with at least one backup–an additional backup online is a possibility. Computer files often don’t last as long as paper, but if one saved copy goes bad, you can make another backup from the remaining copy).
As for school yearbooks, I’d recommend keeping them. But if you decide not to, you could scan the parts that are really important to you, and send the yearbooks to your old school district. Someone there is bound to know someone who would want them.
As for old love letters, I’m with your husband on that one. They’re likely to seem more important if you no longer have them than if you keep them. (I memorized my first love letter which I got when I was in fourth grade. Not much memorizing required–it was pretty short.)
One more thing. I’d scan even those important things you plan to keep. I’ve dealt with flooding, and lost things on paper that were very important to me.
I actually am transcribing some items, like my grandmother’s biography and will offer them to siblings and cousins in pdf format.
That’s cool. I wish my relatives had done something like that. Both sides of my known family tree are missing most of the branches. I suspect it’s a combination of “I ought to write that down some day,” and “I don’t want anybody, not even family, to learn our buried family secrets!”
Could make a cool kind of media res opening for a story. Something historical about a relative or lost love.