Stuff is just stuff until it becomes something that once belonged to someone we love.
Then the inanimate becomes memory and sentiment, an object of longing and loss. It invokes our personal heritage, hints at a genetic code that is our blueprint, or just the exquisite alchemy of human connection.
The lingering residue of that person - gone or far away - is summoned in that item and, in our custodianship, breathes a little life still.
Four South Africans tell Sunday Times LifeStyle about the things they've inherited and how their heritage story is revealed in these items.
YASMIN MAYAT, CO-OWNER AOF MAYAT HART ARCHITECTS
It was always "Dr Ismail Mayat's daughter", never "Yasmin". That's how Yasmin Mayat was known growing up in Fordsburg, Johannesburg. She knew even as a child that she shared her father with his patients. She expected him to come home late from house calls. Patients didn't make appointments, they just arrived.
She knew that treating a chest infection or cleaning a wound was just one part of why patients were in his room - they came also to seek his advice, to sound out their plans.
When, after 40 years, Mayat closed his practice in the 2000s, Yasmin asked for the eye-test chart that had hung in his room for as long as she could recall.
"Those days GPs did everything. My father certainly did everything and he tested people's eyesight too," says Yasmin of her dad, who died this winter at the age of 78.
Browned and stained with age and use, the eye chart is a metaphor for how their father urged her and her brothers to see things, to look deeper.
She hears his words often in her head: "Some things you just can't fix" or "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing". He's conjured up in the random letters of descending size on the chart that now hangs in her lounge.
The eye chart is framed and fixed to a wall - she's never lost sight of it.
SANELE MANQELE, DIRECTOR AT ART EYE GALLERY
Both Sanele Manqele's grannies were given the first name "Gertrude". She keeps both gogo Gertrudes close to her heart … and her skin, wearing items that were theirs as part of her everyday wardrobe.
Sanele pulls on her paternal granny Gertrude Gugulethu's jersey, which was given to her after she wed this year. This gran is in her 90s and lives in KwaZulu-Natal.
"I've always loved her collection of jerseys and I just love this one that she's given me. It's vintage, it's oversized and it goes with everything," Sanele says.
Pulling the jersey over her shoulders connects her to this ageing granny who lives far away.
In the same way she invokes Gertrude Minnie - the granny who died when Sanele was about 10 years old - in a bright red felt hat that was hers.
As Sanele balances the hat on her head she's flooded with memories of the granny who insisted on being called "Granny Mam".
"She was very proper, very ladylike and, like my grandfather, she was a teacher.
"I never used to wear her hat, but lately I've started to," says Sanele.
"I always felt that I didn't really look like anyone in my family and recently a young boy saw a picture of this granny and thought it was a photo of me," she says.
The hat clearly fits - it's why she's wearing it.
ELLA BUTER, OWNER OF SUPERELLA
There's DNA in the photo album that Ella Buter has on her lap. It's her parents' wedding album. It's singed at the edges and the photos' protective plastic sheets have cracked and disintegrated.
"It's about the only thing that they managed to grab from our house in Welkom when it burnt down the year I was in matric," says Ella.
Those black-and-white images of Jan and Jane Buter are a story from before she was. Her parents are captured in their 20s, young, united, celebrated. The photos hold a kind of genetic encryption, clues to who Ella is today.
"I believe that even your creativity comes from your DNA," says Ella as she points out the photos where Afrikaans women, as part of the wedding party, are dressed in traditional costumes and bonnets for volkspele (folk dances) - the cultural dances and games she had to learn as a child, as heritage with no negotiation.
"I will never place these photos into a new album. Like this it reminds me of what we lost in the fire: everything," she says. It's also exactly how she received it when her parents died shortly after each other in the 2000s.
"I think my mother died from heartache without my father," she says, closing the padded album cover. It holds their love story, captured in the moment silver halides on photographic film met light.
DAVID LAI: STUDENT OF LIFE
Folded and unfolded dozens of times, the two-page letter in his hand is as familiar to David Lai as the lines on his palms. The reading and re-reading is an exercise to somehow unravel the puzzle of his birth mother.
David turns 24 today. He was born in the year of SA's democracy, to a woman who signed her name Jia Keng and settled on the English name "Byron" for her boy.
His birth mom, he's told, arrived in SA from Shanghai, China, in the early 1990s. When she fell pregnant out of wedlock she couldn't go back to China without a husband and chose to give him up for adoption through Johannesburg Child Welfare.
Joburg couple Gail and Douglas Lai were on the adoption waiting list when they got the call that a six-week-old Chinese baby was up for adoption. It was an impossible coincidence; it was their miracle, who they christened David Sean Lai.
Along with the letter, Jia Keng left two photos and two pieces of gold jewellery that feature a motif of a dog for the Chinese zodiac year of David's birth.
There was also a teddy bear and a list written in Chinese - 14 points of love through gentle instruction: "Check temperature of bath water with elbow", "don't give random medicine" .
"I wish I could find her and know what her life is like. Does she have another family? Do I have brothers and sisters?" says David.
"I have different emotions. Some days I'm grateful she was selfless to give me up for a better life, some days I'm curious, and some days I'm angry and frustrated," he says...