As time marches on, I wonder what our grandparents would think if they could see us now?

Phil and I have had occasion over the last few months to visit antiques malls, which seem to get larger every year as old folks die off and their belongings end up on display for everyone to see.

We have visited such malls in Brunswick, Fairfield, Wells and Quechee Gorge, Vermont. They are much the same, stretching on and on down long dusty corridors and into room after room arranged by individual dealers. There may be a room or section for jewelry, another for books, dishes, artwork or furniture, for instance. Sometimes a room or cubicle is arranged like a typical bedroom from the turn of the century with bed, nightstand, dresser, wash table with bowl and pitcher and old dolls placed in a rocking chair.

There are beer steins and ashtrays, Mason jars, candlestick telephones, claw foot bathtubs, Griswold frying pans — which we always called spiders — toy automobiles, radiator caps, Life magazines, Depression glass, Victrolas, player pianos.

As we stroll through the aisles and peer at more valuable pieces behind locked glass doors, I think about how these things were once in people’s homes, cherished belongings of those who are now long gone.

These malls are museums, telling us stories of how people baked, worked, played, dressed, slept and entertained themselves long ago.

There are rolling pins, scrub boards, silver sets, coins, stamps, sheet music, desks, trunks, vases. They grow in number every year, filling more space and adding new items for purchase. I realize how quickly my life is moving on when I see a room of items from the 1970s: a bright orange plastic chair, green dial telephone, Corelle ware dishes, a silver disco ball made of tiny mirrors, psychedelic flower stickers. Was it really that long ago they were considered hip — and modern?

When we were kids visiting our grandmothers’ houses, we regarded their belongings as precious — the cut-glass bowls, delicate English teacups, silver settings passed down through generations — things that, when they died, ended up at our parents’ houses. We kept them in China closets and brought them out only on holidays. We were instructed to handle them carefully and safeguard them later in our own homes until it was our turn to pass them on.

Sometimes, lineages end however, and collections end up in estate sales. Some estates are too huge for families to distribute everything, and more and more, many young people have less or no interest in “stuff.”

Items that once held such meaning for those who dusted, guarded and revered them now sit in chilly, dusty antiques malls, their stories long forgotten. What elegant matron wore the diamond ring now lying silent on blue velvet behind the locked glass? Whose child sat in the tiny wooden chair with matching desk, perhaps writing a letter to a faraway relative? How many ancient, wizened patriarchs lay dying in the old fourposter mahogany bed?

Our parents and grandparents, having lived through wars and financial misfortune, kept every little thing, discarding nothing.

But times have changed and young people don’t want all this stuff. The influence of technology is evident in that millennials don’t want Grandma’s cookbooks or recipes; they prefer to get them off the Internet.

The trend is toward simplicity — clean, open space with less stuff. Less is more.

So the pocket watches, brooches, wedding rings and crystal vases sit silent and nameless with other treasures, tucked away on shelves in antiques malls, waiting until someone on a mission or a whim snatches them up to flip for a higher price or place them carefully in a prominent spot to be admired, examined or handed off to a grateful recipient down the line.

Amy Calder has been a Morning Sentinel reporter 27 years. Her column appears here Mondays. She may be reached at acalder@centralmaine.com. For previous Reporting Aside columns, go to centralmaine.com.