Celebrating Picture Books: Bag in the Wind

Recycling plastic grocery bags is great – but what happens when a bag falls out of the recycling bin? Find out in this final celebration of picture book month.

Bag in the Wind

By Ted Kooser; illus. by Barry Root

Ages 5 and up

Candlewick Press 2010

“One cold, windy morning early in spring, a bulldozer was pushing a big pile of garbage around a landfill when it uncovered an empty plastic bag.” That’s how poet Ted Kooser starts his story. This perfectly good bag – the color of the skin of a yellow onion, with two holes for handles – is picked up by a puff of wind and blown over the chain-link fence. From there it is blown into the lives of several people: a girl collecting cans; a store owner with a drafty door; a homeless man.

The story comes full circle when Margaret – the can-collector – uses it to carry home her purchases from a consignment shop. Only, she doesn’t recognize it because it looks like every other grocery bag.

Though this story has a lot more words than the usual picture book, the language is lyrical and makes for a good read-aloud. Plus Kooser includes a couple pages at the end about recycling plastic bags. Did you know that if you use reusable cloth bags instead of plastic bags, you could save over 22,000 plastic bags all by yourself? I didn’t.

Review copy provided by the publisher.