Right now I’m having a hard time throwing away my sofa. I’ve had it for 10 years (and it was given to me second-hand) and it’s mine. But I just bought a super-expensive chair that I can’t fit into the house unless we get rid of one couch, and my couch is the one that has to go. I can’t give it away because it needs a major cleaning (kind of smells like cat pee from when my old cat had a bladder tumour before she passed and we currently have 4 cats and a dog that sleep on it so I’ll never get the pet-smell and fur off it.) I know it has to go to the dump as soon as my husband gets his truck out of winter storage but it’s so hard to let it go.
Dude, I play guitar. So, yes.
My main electric is a Parts-o-Caster Tele I assembled with wood, components, etc. that I picked out, assembled and tweaked to fit my needs. Never played a better fit.
My main acoustic is an 87-year-old Martin that looks and sounds like it.
They are both tools, but they fit my hands and ears like no others.
Do you ever play that game of “what would you take with you from your house if you had to run from a fire/storm/ disaster?” This is assuming pets and kids are safe. There’s an orange candy dish that belonged to my grandmother even before she was married, and had a place holding hard candies on her back porch, until she had to move to a nursing home.
I got the dish and it is my most teasured possession. I’d save it before anything else, even photo albums. All I have to do is look at it and i call up the best memories of my family
We grandkids would sneak candy, trying not to rattle the lid, and think we were really getting away with something. As an adult I realize of COURSE she knew what we were doing, but let us think we’d gotten away with it. Peppermints, lemon drops, and those pastel pillow mints are still favored candies for me, because that it what she stocked it with.
Ah yes, and I even had my two items in a bug-out bag for awhile. Besides my important papers, they were the album where I put all photos that have my mom in them. And the other is the quilt she made that I loved so she gave it to me. 
(I have my Grandma’s candy dish too – we had to brave the rattly china cabinet door and then the clinky dish top. She kept M&Ms in hers – our more down-to-earth Nana kept the kinds of candies you mentioned.)
ETA: A couple of months ago at quilt guild, one woman talked about how folks back in the day would store their best quilts and only bring them out very occasionally. At the same meeting, another woman talked about her mom who had just died. This made me remember Mom who said quilts are for using, not storing somewhere so they stay pristine. This made me get it out of the bug-out bag and at least have it available to use. Still hard for me to really use it like I would any old blanket.
gigi, I have considered putting papers in a bug out bag, but decided that, even though it would be a lot of trouble, I could replace them. And a bag would just keep getting bigger, like a woman’s purse.
For a oractucak bag I have thought of assembling basic underwear, a change of clothes, meds, and a couple days worth of food and bottled water, cash, and oh heck, I guess I could find space for papers. Oh, and TP is worth it’s weight in gold sometimes. A sign at our dog park urges us to do the same for pets.
But the candy dish is what has my heart. I even included it in a story I wrote here on the Dope. Post #4 in this thread. Opinionated readers should VOTE!! in The SDMB Short Fiction Contest, May 2013 - Anthology Thread. - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
I’m pretty fond of a couple of my cars, motorcycles, tools and guns.
Sure. Every scooter I’ve had.
And…um… a “friend” that is in one of my dresser drawers right next to the lube and my bed. 
When I was probably 6 or so, our television set stopped working and my father got rid of it - a great big console black and white one. He took it out in the yard and shot at the screen to break the vacuum, or something like that. Then he took parts out and let me play with the speaker and the amplifier, and I got it playing music somehow and there was some sawdust sitting on the speaker cone, dancing around. I suddenly started crying, as if the TV set had been my friend through all those early Saturday morning cartoons.
Fast forward a bit, and by now I’ve had my house broken into three times and some of the things with the most sentimental value taken, and something inside me changed, and I kind of… gave up… on loving things, because they get lost.
A wooden chain that my dad carved. My late Scottie’s collar, and two of her favorite toys. Everything else is dumpster food.
I seem to develop an inordinate attachment to my writing implements. To the point I don’t like other people to use certain ones, or I worry about losing them (at which point they get retired to “home-only” status). These are not high-quality pens. When I was in high school, I loved my Bic red ballpoints. Over the last 10 years I can recall some Sensas and PhDs I really liked. Right now I have an astronaut pen that I keep by my bed for journaling. No one touches that.
Also, I’m attached to my stuffed animals. My favorite for the last couple of years is Appa the sky-bison from the Avatar: The Last Airbender animated series. He’s very fluffy even if he is rather weird-looking. 
My mother had a photographic portrait made months before her unexpected death when I was 9 years old. On Christmas of the year she passed, my father gave me and each of my siblings a copy of the portrait (the photographer still had the negatives). A simple 8 x 10 B&W portrait in a cheap brass-plated frame.
That portrait made it through my adolescence, went to college with me, made it through several moves. There was a paint drip on the frame from a repainting project. I always made sure it was packed, though.
In the past 40 years, I have lost nearly everything I own two or three times. One was a flood that reached 4 feet in the house, six feet i the garage. I figured that portrait was gone, as was just about everything else I had, including all the other family photographs I had (all my parents wedding pictures, photos of relatives in WWII), a lot of stuff was lost in that flood. If you haven’t had to go through something like that, there is a lot of throwing water-logged boxes away without even going through them because none of it is worth saving and the pain and time it would take to examine everything is just too great.
In my last move, one of the boxes that I nearly just trashed since it was just filled with college papers from the 70s, I poked under those papers and found the portrait. That box had been on the top shelf in the garage during the flood. While some of the college papers were sentimental (old love letters from flames long gone cold), that portrait stopped time. For several minutes immediately after finding it, my vision narrowed and my hearing was blocked; all I remember was staring at her face and reliving everything moment from toilet training to the last words she ever said to me.
Today, it is [del]possibly[/del] my most valued possession. Yeah, I have expensive things, musical instruments, cars, tools, furniture, all the things you’d think a retired professional would have. But, that portrait, now in a gilded frame (thanks to my wife) reminds me, daily, of how fleeting life can be and how possessions are a pretty irrelevant part of it.
But, I do get to see my mother smile at me every morning.
I have a lot of things I really like and wouldn’t want to part with for sentimental reasons. But I have now experienced a much more profound attachment to an inanimate object than I would have thought possible.
My field of research involves the way non-literate cultures memorise masses of practical information without writing. I have copied some of these technologies. For example, I have copied an African lukasa. I have glued some beads and shells onto a piece of wood and it is now one of my most precious possessions. I will never part with it.
I then tested my lukasa as a memory device, encoding the 408 birds in our state to it, in taxonomic order, with ID and other details. Sounds very weird, I know. I basically have a field guide in my head, and don’t even have to have my lukasa with me any more to ‘use it’.
It is a worthless and meaningless object to anyone else, but my attachment to that lukasa is stronger than anything I would have thought possible. How much stronger must the attachment of indigenous knowledge specialists be to their ‘sacred’ objects which they use as memory aids which are so critical to their survival.
Wow, that’s amazing.
How come my vision is getting blurry just after I read this?
I had a car that I dearly loved and cried when I had to get rid of it.
I have several pieces of my mother’s furniture that I absolutely refuse to part with. I also use her pill box for prescription medicines—it’s just a plastic drug store thing but I love it.
I have an old pair of binoculars that my brother-in-law brought back from his tour as a pilot in the Korean conflict. The leather case they came in is cracked and worn and the binoculars are missing an eye piece; they’re useless as is but I won’t part with them.
I have in my possession a blue plastic pawn from some game or other. It doesn’t look like much but there’s a story behind it.
I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder 12 years ago. I was hospitalized because of my intention to commit suicide. I was really ill and barely holding onto sanity.
There was a woman there who was manic. She paced incessantly and purposefully and seemed to be focused on her own world.
Just about the time I began to regain some sense of what was going on, the manic woman was coming down off her high.
One day we were all out having a smoke break and she came up to me, put the pawn in my hand, and said, “The next move is up to you.”
I don’t know if she recognized how scared and confused I was, whether it was part of her own mania, or whether it was Providential. But I keep that pawn where I can see it every day, right below my computer monitor, to remind me of how far I’ve come since those dark days, and to keep on going forward.
Yeah, I think so, too. Which is why it means so much to me.
I know what you mean. My eyes did that when I wrote it. My ophthalmologist tells me it’s cataracts. 
In my psych rotation back in med school, I had a patient who developed an emotional attachment to (and held conversations with) a Christmas ornament.
Sadly, the rotation ended before I found out whether he’d transfer his attentions to the Easter Bunny.
Powerful. Thank you for sharing.
My teddy bear I got from my mother when I was in college, and a baby blanket that’s been with me my entire life, although I never grew attached to it until after I got the teddy bear. I went through some really hard times in college and the years after, and I always had the teddy bear and the softest blanket I could ever imagine. I still spend a lot of time in bed just holding them because I like their textures.