Bag ladies and me

Friends are much like going to the supermarket and being asked the golden question — paper or plastic?

Paper friends are sturdy.  They can be plain.  By that I mean it’s acceptable to see each other without makeup or fancy hair-dos.  Or they can have big bold advertising on them — translated in bag lady talk to it’s okay to be loud and obnoxious.  These friends will be there for you.  Paper bags are good at hiding our secrets.  Still, you need to take proper care of paper bags.  Put both hands under this bag and hold on tight.  Otherwise, they may get a rip or tear in them that cannot be mended. 

Then there are plastic friends — convenient, pliable, maybe a little too see-thru.  They may be the ones you meet at work.  Grab one and stick anything in it.  It can handle it.  Maybe we don’t put as much in these bags as the paper ones, but they are still important to us.  They carry you through the day and put a smile on your face.  Even when this bag is no longer with us, we recognize that it helped lighten our load if only for a day.

There’s now a third bag available at the market — the green bag.  These are lifetime friends made of real fabric, many of them around since before time.  At least a time you can remember.  Sometimes these paperless friends keep in touch through a barrage of reusable emails.  They are comfortable friends who don’t mind being listed third or fourth or fiftieth on an email from you, and who when you see them after a space of time, carry on with you like it was just yesterday.  Memories of this bag are good on your environment and make you smile.

Yesterday, my new friend Kc (we found each other over our mutual blogs), and I met.  I felt so comfortably “green” with her that I may have even shared a strictly confidential piece of information about myself — I use the dryer as a bureau drawer.  When it’s empty it’s time to do another load of laundry.  She challenged me to write a post on paper or plastic.  I hope I made her proud.

I want to thank each of you for being a bag in my life, whether for a reason, a season, an email, or a lifetime.