单项选择题

Even happy families have secrets that run with no statute of limitations. Twenty years after my mother died, I discovered she had kept a scrapbook. It was delivered to me inside an old chest of drawers left by my father, who survived her by 18 years. The drawers were stuffed with memories and junk: his legal papers, his beloved mandolin sheet music, his college yearbooks and, in among some old photographs, a battered, yellowing composition notebook -- a scrapbook kept by my mother for a short time in 1934. I was shocked.
My mother was a thrower-outer -- the scourge of packed closets, the emptier of overfilled drawers. I was a bringer-backer. We once clashed over my cherished tennis shoes, which she mistakenly took to the garbage simply because I was stuffing card- board in the soles to plug the holes. I had to rescue them twice.
Ours was a fundamental clash in human nature, surely as old as the species itself. Some of our hominid ancestors were gatherers who also picked up bright pebbles; others were hunters of clutter who demanded: "Can’t we get rid of some of this stuff" From those who amassed, we have museums, libraries, attics that groan. From the winnowers, we have public sanitation, rarity (if everything were saved, nothing would be rare) and a way to the front door.
The passage implies that