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Article snippet: HOUSTON — As we walked through Shirley Hines’s flood-battered Houston neighborhood on Sunday, we passed pile after pile at the curb — the soggy, ruined contents of people’s homes, mixed with floorboards, Sheetrock and insulation. I suddenly felt a tinge of embarrassment. My 8-year-old son carried a box containing small, pretty things: three red-striped cups, fragile and ordinary kitchen-cabinet objects. In a place where everything was broken, what good was something so shiny and little and whole? The three cups were a gift for Ms. Hines, from a stranger in Maryland. I first met Ms. Hines a few days after her neighborhood was flooded by Hurricane Harvey. The inside of her house was outside at the curb, in a tall messy mound. I was asking her and her neighbors one question for an article I was writing for The New York Times: Amid so much loss, what did you manage to save? Her granddaughter had answered the question for her, pulling a trash bag from the pile and digging through it until she found them — a collection of damaged Fitz and Floyd cups that had belonged to Ms. Hines’s late mother. Ms. Hines was getting rid of all of the cups, and she was having a hard time even talking about it. After I spoke with her for a while, about the cups and what they meant to her, Ms. Hines changed her mind: She decided to keep a few that were not as damaged as the others. A woman in Frederick, Md., Ann Dahms, read the story in The Times and saw the picture of one of Ms. Hines’s ... Link to the full article to read more