Meet Windy. A plastic bag who recently celebrated her second birthday with a large, white, fancy cake complete with a frosting photo of herself in her home; a tree on the Lehigh University campus in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. OK, maybe Windy didn’t exactly celebrate her birthday as much as Kathy Frederick, who works on the University campus, did.
Frederick “met” Windy about two years and three months ago, when, after a “particularly wicked winter storm,” she noticed Windy stuck in a tree branch just outside her window. “I thought, oh, that bag is going to be there forever now,” Frederick said. “I could tell right away that it was stuck enough that another wind was not going to come blow it out.” Now, Frederick has become somewhat enamored with the plastic bag in the tree, who, she claims, is absolutely not gender-neutral–Windy is definitely a female.
Frederick’s obsession with Windy has led to a regularly-updated section on her blog, The Junk Drawer, where she details stories about Windy and her status in the tree. “The fans are crazy about this lone bag,” she said. ”It’s really caught everybody’s fancy, for some reason.”
As cool as Windy may be, Frederick also acknowledges that Windy’s two-year-plus status in the tree top is reflective of the fact that plastic bags really do last a long, long time. In an interview she did with NPR yesterday, Frederick also recognized that Windy’s “aging” over the past two years (going from a bulbous-when-wind-blown bag to a slightly “ragged” version of her old self) means all of the small pieces of plastic she’s lost from her body have gone somewhere… but haven’t decomposed one bit.
Despite the fun and what some might call hilarity of Windy, she ultimately represents the sad nature of plastic bags–they stay put, and, although they show signs of structure loss (see Frederick’s YouTube video below), they simply don’t degrade over the years. So for now, Windy will continue to be herself, up in her tree, waving in the wind and never letting go of her branch. But maybe, she can also be the voice for plastic bags around the world–telling people that it’s time to find an alternative bag that doesn’t (unlike Windy) have the capacity to stay slung in a tree for years and years.
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