The Last Dance of the Plastic Shopping Bag

It has been lambasted, blamed, and banned. But somehow it still rises on the wind. WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED by PETER MOORE

BECAUSE I LIVE IN A STATE (COLORADO) WHERE LEGISLATORS ACTUALLY TRY TO ACCOMPLISH THINGS, I personally had the opportunity to kill plastic-bags. My fellow voters agreed—doesn’t everybody hate those sad sacks?—and the statewide ban kicked in on January 1.

Goodbye, and good riddance!

Not long after the vote, a bag landed on a high branch in our neighbor’s towering ash tree, and I realized: Many loathsome things—the designated hitter, your Aunt Mildred’s oyster dressing, Newlywed Game reruns—never actually go away.

My favorite poem by Galway Kinnell invokes “the still un-danced cadence of vanishing.”

So it is with the plastic shopping bag: Banned and loathed, but borne aloft, unvanquished.