Various friends of mine online live near the fires in San Diego. These fires have brought up one of those great old questions that people use as icebreakers. If your house is on fire, and you can grab one thing before you rush out, what would it be?

For all of you social bloggers who love memes, please, leave a comment on your answer and/or post your response on your blog.

For me, it is an interesting question. We’ve just moved. I had been in the previous house for fifteen years. It was a large house and a lot of junk piled up. We got rid of three large dumpsters of junk. We had a tag sale. We gave away stuff with freecycle. We move most of what was left, although we still have stuff in that needs to be moved or gotten rid of.

Through this, I’ve become much less attached to different objects. What matters to me, beyond my family, is mostly up online, my blog entries, my photographs. So, I don’t have a good answer to the question.

However, I did get an interesting email from a friend in San Diego. She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She grew up being constantly told not to get too connected to material goods because hanging on to them could result in death if you couldn’t flee in time. Yet even for her, there are objects of great importance and she wrote about waking up in the middle of the night wanting to contact her daughter to reminder her about the Shabbat/Sabbath candlesticks that her mother had brought with her from Germany when she fled.

There are objects in our lives that tie us down. There are symbols in our lives that lift us up. It is important to know which is which.