Starting Friday, businesses in Nova Scotia can no longer hand out single-use plastic bags at the check-out.
Like many people in this province, I refer to those objects as Sobeys bags, even though the venerable Stellarton-born outfit, along with its subsidiaries, became the first national grocery chain to ban them in their stores way back at the start of 2020.
There is a simple explanation for this: I know the appalling damage that plastic bags inflict on the planet -- how they turn up in the stomachs of whales and turtles and in landfills, and how they have become a symbol of our wasteful, throw-away society.
It is high time that they are gone.
At the same time, plastic grocery bags have been a part of my life for a long time. They deserve a proper send-off, in the way that a loathsome relative deserves a funeral eulogy, so here goes.
Farewell to those bags that kept my feet warm in the winter, inside rubber boots that seemed as thin as bedroom slippers, replacing the socks that slide irrevocably down the foot until massing in a clump in the boot’s toe.
Goodbye to the clusters of polyethylene that played a similar, essential role inside skates, particularly outside, on the Frog Pond or Williams Lake, where even multiple layers of socks were no real protection when the winter wind did howl.
Adios, while we are still talking from a child’s perspective, to a container for school basketball uniforms and wet bathing suits, as well as the stand-in for a hobo’s bundle, when we decided life was too much too bear and we had to run away from home, at least until Get Smart came on.
Au revoir, since we live in an officially bilingual country, to the receptacles that held my peanut-butter and jam sandwiches, to be wolfed down before junior high noon-hour intramurals, my salami and cheese for noon hours during summer jobs, and my left-overs gobbled at my desk as a wage-earning adult.
See you later to those carrier sacs that nearly took my fingers off when it was necessary to leg some groceries from the supermarket all the way home, and to this day sit in a "bag of bags" that is big enough to fill the space under the sink.
Gone, forever, then are the days when to open an opaque Sobeys bag in the back of the fridge was one of life’s tiny adventures.
Ta ta, as well, to those ever-adaptable carry-alls that can be reversed during a dog-walk to pick up Fido’s sidewalk deposit.
I speak here of something that can be used as a make-shift plastic glove in the kitchen when handling, say, jalapenos, that can cover a small broken window, or a wet paint brush, but is versatile enough to keep your head dry in an unexpected rain storm, and protect the plaster cast on your broken wrist while you are in the shower.
So long to those indestructible masses that are invariably the only man-made thing that can be found on a stretch of isolated beach or in a seldom trod forest glade, as if giving nature the middle figure.
Cheerio to those things that clung, tattered and forlorn, in the branches of trees, that, if glimpsed on a somber, perhaps hungover day, just seemed to make the spirits sag further.
The Irish, wonderfully, call them witches knickers, which hints at a scene so disquieting that the American writer Ian Frazier and his friends, all mid-westerners, long-ago, developed a device called a “snagger” with which they spent entire weekends removing plastic bags from New York trees.
I just try to avert my eyes, as if by not seeing the ragged shapes, I prevent their bleak power from getting in.
A less joyful good-bye to those eminences that float like ghosts on a windy day in some deserted city back lot. Glimpsed that way they make me feel a bit like the glassy-eyed plastic bag-watching narrator in the movie American Beauty, who says, “Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world ... I feel like I can't take it... and my heart is just going to cave in."
Our future, thankfully, is now one of recyclable paper bags, cloth totes and washable, reusable Tupperware containers, that can be seen through.
Gone, forever, then are the days when to open an opaque Sobeys bag in the back of the fridge was one of life’s tiny adventures.
A final adieu to those moments when we stood there, door open, peering in, wondering just what the hell was in that bag, and, most crucially, how long had it been there?
Twitter: @CH_coalblackhrt
