Back when I was a student, I had an eight o'clock class more fall semesters than I would've liked, and I dreaded it on Mondays and Wednesdays. But never on Fridays. I would park in the garage and walk out half awake but excited nonetheless, and as I got closer and closer to campus, that's when I would see them. A crew from Landscape Services and the first of many red and blue trash cans being set out. Campus was not full yet, but it was starting. I can still feel the rush of excitement it gave me.
By the time class let out and I stepped back outside, they were everywhere. Thousands of them, red and blue down every path, around the Circle, and all through The Grove as far as you could see. That is when it became real. Not the schedule on the refrigerator, not the text from a friend at another school asking about coming to visit that weekend. The trash cans. On those mornings I felt such pride in my school and such pure, undiluted joy about what was coming tomorrow that I would catch myself grinning at a garbage can. Every Ole Miss student knows that feeling. It's the reason most of us have posed for a picture inside one!
What Friday means in Oxford
Trash Can Friday is exactly what it sounds like. Early on the Friday morning before every home game, the university's Landscape Services crew sets out somewhere between fifteen hundred and twenty-five hundred red and blue trash cans and recycling bins across The Grove, the Circle, and all the paths in between. Fifteen hundred for a smaller game. Closer to twenty-five hundred when the conference comes to town. And I would bet there was a record number of them out last week before Ole Miss's victory over LSU. A highly anticipated matchup, with GameDay on the Grove Stage early that Saturday and the stands completely packed a full hour before kickoff. It was a big weekend for the trash cans and an even bigger weekend for Ole Miss fans that I do not expect any of us to stop talking about for a very long time.
They go out before most of campus is awake, and by the time first classes let out, the whole place is spotted with color.
Nothing else has happened yet. The tents are still in trailers. The tablecloths are still folded. The band's red jackets are still on their hangers, and the twirlers' batons are still in their cases. But the cans are the first tell. They are how the students, and all of Oxford with them, learn without anyone saying a word that tomorrow is game day.
The cans are the first tell.
How the tradition started
Like most of the best things at Ole Miss, nobody planned it. When Jeff McManus began running Landscape Services in 2000, the department was hauling heavy fifty-five-gallon drums around campus before games, and the drums were a chore to move and a worse chore to clean. So the department swapped them for lighter, stackable cans, and while they were at it, ordered them in red and blue. That was the whole idea. Make the trash cans easier to move and a little more school-spirited. McManus has since said that the best traditions happen on their own, because nobody plans them, and this one is proof of just how true that is.
The students did the rest. Somebody climbed into an empty can for a photo, and then everybody did. The cans started showing up on social media before anything else. And eventually the university wrote Trash Can Friday into its official list of campus traditions, right alongside the Walk of Champions and the cheer. A trash can, on the official list. Who would have ever thought?
Then, once the game is over and the crowd has gone home, every one of those cans is picked up, emptied, washed, stacked, and stored for the next home game. Nobody photographs that part. I had never given it a thought myself, until I sat down with a list of everything I might put on the Grove Collection's tiles and asked which of them meant the most to me.
Why a trash can, of all things
Here is what I love most about all of this, and it is the reason the cans ended up on a tile. Of everything on this campus, the trash can is the least glamorous object there is. It would have been easy to leave it plain and let it do its job. Instead, somebody decided that even the garbage cans should wear the colors, and a school has to love itself a great deal to make a decision like that. It is care for the smallest detail, the same instinct that hangs a chandelier in a tent. Nothing on this campus is too ordinary to be done on purpose.
But the trash cans are not only a sign of how much school spirit Ole Miss has. They are also a sign of how well this family looks after its home. Tens of thousands of people every Saturday, hundreds of thousands over a season, come to campus to eat and drink and gather under its trees, and on Friday morning the campus gets ready not only to take care of them, but to be clean again by Sunday. Every cup, every plate, every napkin from every table has somewhere to go. It is the difference between throwing a party and hosting one. Any good Southern hostess knows that the real work of a party happens before the first guest arrives and after the last one leaves, and that the work is the part you take pride in. The trash cans are exactly that, done in red and blue, two thousand times over.
It is the difference between throwing a party and hosting one.
That is what I want people to understand about this place. The alumni who have been gone thirty years still talk about The Grove like a house they grew up in. The students who live here now treat it like one. The whole family takes care of the place we gather, and somehow we have made even the act of taking care of it into something to look forward to, a tradition of its own. You do not see that in many places. It is respect for a place you love, and it is pride in keeping it worth loving, so the next person who walks through it feels exactly what you did.
The dot tiles
On the Grove Collection's dot tiles, the dots are trash cans. One red can on the One Dot, two blue on the Two Dot, and so on up to nine. The mix of red and blue you see walking to class is the mix you see on the tiles. I drew them from the side, each one wearing the Ole Miss script, so they read as exactly what you would see on campus on those glorious Fridays. The tiles are built in layers and the art is embossed, so under your thumb the cans stand up off the surface the way they stand along the paths across campus. Nine small things, designed with care and intention.
Small things, on purpose
Nothing decorative by accident. That is the first thing I say about Marelle, and it is the first thing I would say about a red or blue trash can in Oxford. A good table is made of small things somebody made the effort to care about: the cloth, the light, the snacks, and especially the people sitting at it. The Grove taught me that.
The cans will be back out before the next home game, and by the time you read this, they may already be. Wherever you are, do the small things on purpose today. Set the table. Count the dots. Another Saturday in The Grove is on its way.