The Bag Ladies
The Bag Ladies
The story of the Bag Ladies may well belong under the Environmental heading but the main thrust of the Bag Lady is a money quest, not an environmental issue. The elders in the village are all hyped up about recycling and every other day one of them comes up with another idea to save the earth from certain disaster. No one has suggested recycling us villagers yet, which is a great pity - I could be writing forever!
Of course the most obvious recycling program was one of the first - bottles and cans. They are a terrible nuisance. Our soda pops come either in one-and-a-half liter plastic bottle supposedly bio-degradable but which last a thousand years in direct sunlight and others come in aluminium cans which appear to be indestructible. The council of elders debated up and down for weeks as to how to solve the problem until someone interrupted with a brilliant suggestion. "Put a hefty deposit on the bottles and cans and the problem will be solved. All the kids in the village will pick them and return them to collect the deposit."
And so it was done. But surprise of surprises. It wasn't the village kids who picked up the bottles and cans. A whole generation of little old ladies, many with blue hair, emerged from their fancy homes onto the streets and lanes. They are all well-dressed and wheel expensive designer supermarket bags, the kind that is made of a wire frame covered with a material or plastic often in a tartan pattern. They push or pull these elegantly around the village, stopping at every trash container. Here they lift the inevitable cigarette to their mouths and use their hands to scrabble quickly through the trash can in search of instant cigarette money.
These are our Bag Ladies and they are keeping the village squeaky clean. They earn good cigarette money at the same time.
