The year was 1937. Her future husband spotted her across the room at a college party. They danced, but he never caught her name. Later, he described her to a female friend, who said she knew exactly whom he was describing – and inadvertently gave the name of a different girl. Then he saw the right girl again months later walking past the fraternity house. This time he asked a different friend if he knew who she was. He did – she was his sister. But the friend played it coy and refused to say so, claiming afterwards that he believed if the pair were meant to meet, it would happen without his help. So it was months before the couple finally connected – and years more before they were married.

But as my memoir client starts telling me this story for the third time, I try not to sigh. We’re on a schedule of interviewing for one hour a week, by phone because she lives in New York, and it’s been seven weeks so far. I had been hoping to finish a first draft in August. But this client speaks slowly, though very clearly. She’s a wonderful story-teller and remembers captivating details. Nonetheless, hearing the story for the third time, with so much left to go in the narrative of her ninety-five years, feels a little like spinning our wheels.

Then something catches my attention. A detail she hadn’t included before. And another one. An account of the job she held while he attended classes. A side story about how much she wanted to be a mother and how frustrating it was to wait while her husband finished graduate school before they could start a family.

This is the same basic account I’ve heard before, I realize as she’s talking, and yet each time a few more details emerge. And it occurs to me that during the many hours of the week that pass between our weekly phone calls, she must be thinking about these segments of her life, going over them again in her mind, remembering a little more each time.

Remembering anew what it was like to meet her husband, to begin their courtship, to embark upon married life, to have the children she longed for. Remembering times – and people – long gone.

And it all reminds me that while the main purpose of these memoir projects is what I rather clinically call “the deliverable” in my contract – that is, the bound and printed book – the process is perhaps as important as the product to some of my clients. Telling their story, and having me hear their story, may be as valuable to some of them as the book itself.

A little less than a year ago, my husband Rick and I came up with the idea that I should do a memoir project with his 91-year-old grandmother. The odd thing was that later, neither of us could really remember what gave us that impulse at just that time, or why we never thought of it earlier. The idea just dawned on us one day, and I started interviewing her a couple of weeks later. Her book was completed fairly fast – which turned out to be very good luck, since although she was in reasonably good health as we embarked upon the project, she unexpectedly passed away days after I finished writing it.

Rick came up with a theory, though, about how the inspiration came out of nowhere to do this project. He thinks it was his grandfather’s idea. His grandfather had died four years earlier, but Rick thinks on some spiritual plane, his grandfather put the idea in our heads, believing it was important for his wife to tell the story of her life one last time, to go over each detail from start to finish, to describe her girlhood, parents and siblings and friends; her education; her marriage; her years of raising children; her intense spiritual journey as a devout Catholic. To know she was heard.

It reminded me not to try to hurry my current client, even as she repeats anecdotes, sometimes with new details and sometimes without. It’s important to her to tell the story. It’s the story of her life, but telling it to me is part of her life’s journey as well. I’m listening carefully, and soon her daughters and granddaughters and other family members will be able to read it in printed form. So we’ll take our time, week by week, hour by hour, for as long as it takes for her to tell me this story. The process of telling it matters. As much, perhaps, as having it told.

“We’re minimalists by nature, and besides, we’ve lived in our current home for only four years, so moving should be easy.”

Oh, how naively I uttered those words, countless times between when we unexpectedly found our perfect house this past spring and our July 1 moving date.

In retrospect, it reminds me a little bit of expectant parents who tell you about their birth plan, stipulating music that will be played, aromas wafted, and meditations conducted to ensure that they have the perfect birth. In reality, childbirth is hard no matter how carefully you plan for it -- and so is moving.

Now that we’ve spent a full two weeks in our new home sorting through vases and bowls and books and photos and kitchen accessories and bike equipment, calling ourselves minimalists seems like truly a stretch of the imagination. As I contemplated how to relocate ourselves and our possessions into a new home exactly half the size of our last home -- and even less than half the size of the home we owned before that -- I could only dream of being the kind of people who can relocate into a San Francisco-style “micro-apartment” or a renovated shipping container. Taped-up boxes surrounded us, hemming us in, tripping us, creating walls and forts and barriers throughout the rooms. Where could it possibly all go in our downsized home? And if it couldn’t go anywhere, what would we do with it instead?

As my family and I sorted through the items that we’d used or displayed or stored in our last house, and still more items that we’d never unboxed from our previous move four years earlier, I found myself generally thinking one of two phrases, as each item emerged from its packaging. In some cases, it was “Oh, I love that painting/pitcher/photo/serving platter!” But a lot more often, it was “What were we thinking?”

It’s been eye-opening to me over the past couple of weeks to see how possessions pile up even for people who consider themselves fairly ruthless about getting rid of things. And in our new World War II era house with almost no closets, no usable basement, no garage, and a minuscule attic, I find myself flummoxed.

Deciding what to keep among functional household items is one thing. In the kitchen, I simply applied my sister’s clever rule for decluttering: allow nothing in your kitchen that serves only one infrequent purpose. With that, farewell to the pineapple corer, the corn-on-the-cob plates, the vertical chicken roaster, the bread machine. That part was easy. I know what I use regularly in my kitchen, and I felt very little sentimentality for the items I don’t use.

But it gets trickier with objects that have memories attached: carved wooden animals from our African safari; bright purple and yellow glazed pots from the kids’ pottery classes; hand-painted tiles we bought in a shop in Amsterdam in which chickens roamed the aisles.

Additionally, there are objects that represent memories of other people. My husband’s grandmother liked to collect random china teacups on her travels, and many of those teacups were bequeathed to us. His grandmother is gone now, and we both want to remember her. But is holding on to unmatched teacups that we really don’t have space for the right way to do it?

As someone who makes a living helping people write their memoirs, it’s easy for me to claim that none of these material objects matters as long as we have written records of our lives. But of course, I have photographer friends who would say it’s the photographs that best reflect our lives. Friends who are painters who would say it’s paintings that preserve our memories. Even “crafter” friends who make quilts or knit sweaters to preserve memories.

It’s difficult to make the final cut. But I remind myself that other people can make use of our material objects when we can’t. Extra coffee mugs went to a neighbor’s son who is setting up his first post-college apartment. Other kitchen items will go to a local charity that helps formerly homeless people stock their new homes. Clothes that our tiny 1940s-era closets can’t accommodate will be sold by Goodwill, the profits used to help other people in need.

I hope I’m right, that it’s the written word – or photos or paintings or other creative endeavors – that ultimately matters most when it comes to preserving our memories. I hope I don’t regret any of the items we’re giving away.

I don’t think I will, though. In my line of work as a memoir writer, I listen to a lot of people reminisce. “I wish I could better remember….”, they sometimes say. Or “I wish I’d asked….” Or “If only I knew more about…”

But they never say “I wish I still owned.” Not about a bread machine. Nor a pineapple corer. Not even a hand-painted tile from the Netherlands. And most of those things can be replaced if we miss them too much. But somehow I just don’t think we will.