Shopping Bags: One Easy Piece

Being faced with major life decisions, and now preparing for an international move from Ontario to California have kept me busy these past few months, leaving little time for blogging. My husband and I are trying to sell our house, which means open houses and surprise home inspections from potential buyers. Whenever we know that a prospect is going to come through our home, we clear and clean the house from top to bottom, sometimes frantically hurling useful everyday objects, unopened mail and stray pieces of paper into our cold cellar in order to make every surface look uncluttered and every room look spacious, which our real estate agent advised us to do.

I've been committed to using reusable cloth shopping bags for about eight months, and it's taken almost that long to get into a grove with it, but I finally did! It became my habit to either take the empty bags back out to my car immediately after unloading my purchases so that I could use them on the next shopping trip, or if I was lazy or tired after unpacking, I'd place the bags next to the front door and simply bring them out to the car the next time I went out. There was a stool next to the door that I'd temporarily place the bags on, and it looked messy but I was willing to put up with a little bit of clutter in order to ween myself off of plastic bags. I think you can see where I'm going with this. Now that we are living under a temporary ban on clutter because of our real estate situation, the way station by the door has been dismantled and half of the bags are missing. I've lost my reusable bag groove. After seeing our plastic bag caddy slowly empty, it's quickly filling up again, to my shame.

The house isn't sold, and we must start packing -- soon! I don't expect to get my cloth bag groove back until we're settled into our new apartment in California, because one thing I've learned is that the second "R" (reuse) only works in practice if there is a dedicated physical space to hold the reusable items between uses. Just as everything else that we use more than once (clean clothes, dirty clothes, shoes, toothbrushes, spice jars), are easier to find if they have their own dedicated storage spaces, so too are the cloth shopping bags between shopping trips.

During this time of disorganization and physical chaos, the cloth bags aren't the only things to have gone missing around here. Some important legal documents and would-be helpful notes have been stubbornly missing for a week. So, I'm not going to beat myself up over gaining a few plastic bags. When I wasn't in the process of moving to another country, reusing my shopping bags was easy; anyone who isn't in the middle of moving -- or for any other reason turning their life upside-down -- should be willing and able to do it. Consider how low-cost an investment the practice of reducing and re-using plastic shopping bags is, especially compared to replacing inefficient appliances, adding insulation your house, or installing solar panels. It really is a great starting point in terms of green lifestyle changes.