Over the next few years, as the Florida real estate market waxed and waned, and as my stepfather lost or quit various jobs, we rode a financial roller coaster that never seemed to slow down.

One week we would be sitting in a living room surrounded by plush, expensive furniture — “Mediterranean,” my mother informed her friends — and the next the living room would be empty, save for the patio furniture (four wrought-iron chairs and a round glass table, minus its umbrella) that we moved indoors to replace the pieces that had gone back to the department store.

And then, of course, there were the houses themselves. Sometimes we traded up, as when we lived in a three-bedroom ranch set on a canal, with a boat anchored at our dock. More often, we traded down, with the low point being the two-bedroom mobile home my parents, my brother and I squeezed into for part of my junior year.

In all, I moved seven times between sixth grade and my senior year in high school. Packing up my belongings became a familiar, and onerous, routine. I was never denied the chance to bring anything — no pronouncements that there was no room in the new house for the violin I never played, for instance — but over time, it just became easier to bring fewer things with me.

I did so almost without a second of regret.

Looking back, decades later, I realize that all this upheaval — prosperity one day, penny-pinching the next — has left me with a somewhat complicated relationship with possessions. It’s not that I don’t like expensive things. I do, and I have the credit card receipts to prove it. It’s just that I don’t get very attached to the objects I own.