brown-bagging it

Finishing another chapter of my latest read, I spooned the last bit of raspberry yogurt to my mouth and put the container down. One final honey-wheat pretzel stick, and I bunched up my plastic baggies, coupled them with my used plastic spoon and threw them in the trash can. Then I picked up my library book and neatly folded my brown lunch bag—I would use it again tomorrow.

I bring my own lunch to work every day. This isn’t new; I’ve been doing it since I started my job back in June.

What is new is the saving of the brown lunch bag. I buy these disposable bags in packs of 200 from the grocery store, for a price I don’t even remember off the top of my head. It couldn’t be more than $3. Let’s just say it is $3—doing the math, this means each bag costs $0.015. That’s nothing, really. And come on, I’m making good money; it’s not like I can’t afford to buy a pack of brown bags every 200 lunches. It’s hardly going to break me.

So why do I keep saving and reusing these bags?

To be honest, I’m not sure. Last Friday, for example, when I pulled three neatly folded, mint-condition brown bags out of my desk drawer, planning to take them home and store them in the cabinet for use the next week, I felt time pause. Purse slung on my arm, coat picked up, I had reached for my book and grabbed these bags. What in the world? I put them in my car and drove them home and thought: Have I gone a little overboard with this whole savings thing?

Earlier that week, I had seen that I was low on brown bags. There were two new, unused ones left. Yet somehow now, I’ve found a way to postpone purchasing a new, under-$3 package. Does this make me a frugal, thrifty individual? Or am I slowly nickel-and-dime-ing (or in this case, 1.5-pennying) my way to insanity?

Again, I don’t know. I am comforted, I suppose, by the utter freeness I feel to purchase things I really want, like the $80 boots of yesterday: brand-name and on sale, yes, but also unnecessary and probably a little extravagant.

The thing is, I’m finding, that I really hate wasting. The reason I’ll OK the $80 boots is because, well, I know I’ll use them. They’re replacing a $20 pair I got from Payless three years ago. That pair doesn’t fit as well and it has a hole in the right bottom heel that I repaired, but I’ve used them consistently for quite a while.

I don’t feel OK about tossing a $0.015 brown bag when it’s perfectly good. If I didn’t get anything on it, if there aren’t any holes or tears in it, why should I throw it away? That, to me, feels like wasting.

So here I am. I am slowly, timidly navigating the confusing world of wasting, not-wasting and frugality.

Right now, that means saving clean lunch bags.

So be it.