"Of course, the basic thing that gets in a New York City tree is the white plastic deli bag. [Here in the suburbs it's the blue plastic Wal-Mart bag, but you get the point.] It reaches the tree with the aid of the wind, or (as I sometimes think) by its own powers. With its flimsy whiteness and its two looped handles, it suggests a self-levitating undershirt; we have named it the undershirt bag. It does not have a soul, but it imitates one, rising and floating on the exhalations of a subway grate like the disembodied spirits that poets used to converse with in Hell. Its prehensile handles cling to any branch that comes within range, and then grab hold for eternity. This bag is not hard to get out of a tree when it's still fresh, but as it ages and shreds, it becomes more difficult. . .
If you spend a lot of time taking bags out of trees, you learn that they don't wish anybody well. It's no accident that a visual convention for spookiness is dangling spiderwebs, moss-draped branches, jungly, heart-of-darkness drooping vines. Though not the Dark Power itself, bags in trees nonetheless act as its minions; or, to put it another way, nothing makes a neighborhood look scarier than bare-branch trees draped with plastic-bag shreds above a razor-wire fence similarly fluttering and bestrewn. The bags and debris are an established part of the picture. They like it up there, and prefer not to be disturbed."
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