Valentine’s Day when I was a child: We made construction paper pouches in school and hung them up in the classroom. We all filled in one paper Valentine card – Snoopy or Batman or Scooby Doo – for each classmate (From: ME/To: YOU) and on the big day tucked one paper card into each paper folder.

It was all very biodegradable.

So that’s what I had in mind when I shopped for my son’s Valentine’s Day party at school. The kids had been asked to bring in shoe boxes to collect Valentines, but the three-dimensionality of this instruction didn’t get through to me. Paul and I picked out two kinds of cards – Frozen and Spiderman – and he wrote his name on each one. Sealed ‘em up, packed them to go. We even made big cards for his teachers.

On Valentine’s Day, I opened Paul’s red paper covered shoe box to find not cards but gifts – little toys and puzzles and plastic-wrapped tchotchkes. They were cute and complicated. Thoughtful, fun. I immediately felt bad that all we’d given out were cards (thankfully Paul didn’t seem to mind) because I didn’t get the memo that a simple card isn’t enough anymore.

But as he dug through the trove at home, scattering the stuff all over the floor, I grew irritated. Instead of a paper folder full of cardboard cards we’d eventually recycle, we had a new bunch of plastic crap in the house. Bluey rings! Spiderman maze games! An action figure made out of goo that sticks to the wall!

No disrespect to the classmates and their parents who gave my son cute Valentine gifts, but isn’t this a miniature instance of PLASTIC INFLATION? Even as we’re discovering the extent of the harm plastic is doing to our world and our bodies, we’re producing and  buying more and more of the stuff.

When I was a kid in the 1980s, we gave paper cards in paper mailboxes and everyone was happy. Now there’s an expectation that everyone will distribute miniature toys in plastic wrappers. I think this reflects a larger increase in plastic use during the same span of time.

There’s more plastic junk cluttering our homes and contaminating our oceans and blowing over the farm fields across the way because our expectations for it have gone way up.

Plastic has been accumulating in my mind lately on two fronts:

• “Recycling” and how it’s really a myth that plastic can be reused but is rather the basis of a deeply unjust international waste trade.
• Microplastics, the miniscule bits of plastic that are in our water systems, our food, our bodies. So there’s very likely plastic accumulating in my brain as well as my mind.

Each of these deserves its own essay, and I’ll get to that. For right now, I’ll say that I can’t unsee the harm plastic is causing our world after reading the book WASTE WARS: THE WILD AFTERLIFE OF YOUR TRASH by Alexander Clapp.

In our corner of the globe, the plastic waste only multiplied when we got to Easter early this month. Paul’s school planned an egg hunt – each family was to bring in 24 pre-filled plastic eggs. I used the eggs from last year’s egg hunts and filled them with little plastic toys from previous birthday parties and holidays – including that Valentine’s trove. I didn’t buy a single new trinket, not because I’m a cheapskate but because I couldn’t stand the thought of yet another round of plastic trash entering the community – or my house.

The day of the egg hunt rolled around, the kids lined up. Go! Within 60 seconds another harvest of plastic eggs and their contents was complete. Paul brought his trove home a little disappointed with how few eggs he’d nabbed.

I didn’t rejoice that he’d brought in a small haul. I do want my kid to have fun, and spring egg hunts are a classic kid experience. However, Paul participated in four of them this year. I’ve noticed that the toys and trinkets in each egg get less precious to him the more he opens.

Earth Day rolled around later in April and Paul’s school admirably organized a scavenger hunt. The kids roved a local park with worksheets showing objects we find in nature (leaf, flower, frog, bee) and objects we ought not to find in nature but do anyway (food wrapper, soda can, plastic bag).

A few toys lasted beyond the Easter egg rush. For days, Paul shot a rubbery blue tube slingshot with a bunny head (who thinks of these things?) around the house. On Saturday, driving home from a park, he shot it out the car window and into a farm field.

“It’s trash now,” I said, trying to teach a lesson of some kind. But it came out sounding mean. “I’ll go back there tomorrow, on a run. I doubt I’ll find it, but I’ll try.”

It took me two days, but I did run back that way. About two miles from my house I was just thinking how impossible it was going to be to see that little doo-dad in the grass when I looked down and there it was. I yelped, picked it up and stuffed it in my pocket like it was suddenly the most precious possession.

Not trash. Not yet.