Blogs

Guess what these dimensions define? Cardboard: 21-5/8″ x 6-7/8″ Clear plastic cover: 9-7/8″ x 7″ x 1-1/8″ Zipper: 9-7/8″

Give up?

It's the packaging that encapsulated the two standard-size, 20″ x 30″ pillowcases I bought this week.

Don't ask me why pillowcases, and indeed sheets, blankets and any number of other items need to be zipped up in plastic. True, the ones blankets come in can be reused to store out-of-season clothes, for instance, and I've used the smaller sizes to keep things sorted when I travel. But really, why can't we just purchase such things "unwrapped," so to speak?

My mother made sheets and pillowcases from muslin. Sometimes she prettified the pillow "sheets," as she called them, with embroidery. The thought of buying something she could make for "half the price" was scandalous to her. To be truthful, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven the first time I slept on store-bought sheets. There's a world of difference between unbleached muslin sheets and soft, combed-cotton ones.

Five decades ago I remember buying sheet sets that were wrapped only with a pretty satin ribbon tied in a bow. Back then, "off-the-shelf" meant a sales clerk took the items off the shelf behind the counter and showed the items to you gently, almost reverently. Today, sadly, the term means the customer takes it off a shelf herself, handles it, makes her decision, and often, if she decides against the purchase, she shoves it back any ol' where.

Today's self-serve mentality has redefined both shopping and packaging.

Recently, California became the first state in the nation to outlaw plastic-film bags. Stores will no longer be able to provide disposable bags to shoppers and they must charge for paper bags. The hope is that people will rely on reusable bags instead. Eliminating disposables will reduce the amount of plastic film that winds up in waterways, on roadsides, in trees and landfills. Of course, manufacturers are already planning protests, but couldn't they retool their factories to make reusable totes instead? Of course they could; they just don't want to.

These thoughts were tumbling around in my head the day I found the most perfect pillowcases ever! Smothered though they were in zippered plastic, they promised bedtime solace and no nightmares.

- Judy Clarke

Judy Clarke is a wife, mother of two daughters, grandmother to two grown grandchildren, reader, writer and blogger in southwest Virginia. Her two non-fiction books, Mother Tough Wrote the Book and That's all she wrote, can be found on her friends' and family's shelves, and she's working on a novel, But why? (That's the title of the novel, not a question to self).