My Middlebury Trash Can

When I moved onto campus at Middlebury College in the fall of 1973, I shipped a trunkful of belongings ahead of me. Then, on the plane with me before Freshman Week, I brought two suitcases, a carry-on, and a guitar case. But I didn’t bring a wastepaper can, and the dorm did not issue such a receptacle with its other furnishings.

So not long after arriving on campus, I bought a trash can in the college bookstore. I thought it a handsome addition to the dorm room, emblazoned as it was with the college seal.

I still have the can—it now holds the trash in my office in our home until the night before garbage collection each week, when I empty it. The can has been in that location since we moved into this house over three years ago.

Before that, it was in the master bedroom of our old house for the almost thirty-five years we lived there. I’m a little hazy where it resided between 1979 and 1984, but it has always had a place of useful honor wherever I’ve lived.

My Middlebury wastepaper can has seen many unfortunate experiences. None of them mine.

The first wasted event I remember was Halloween night, 1973. My freshman roommate went to a party and came back intoxicated. Quite intoxicated. She baptized my wastepaper can sometime during the night, maybe several times.

As a good roommate, the next morning I washed it out and let her sleep it off.

The next year, my sophomore roommate did the same thing, though it wasn’t Halloween night. I’m not sure when during the year this roommate’s unfortunate experience occurred, but again I washed out my wastepaper can.

And then I swore off roommates.

Until I got married during my second year at Stanford Law School.

My husband and I used the trash can in our married student apartment. One evening in the spring of 1978, he carried it out to the garbage chute down the hall to empty it, and dropped it on his big toe. He sliced the toe pretty badly, with blood everywhere, or so he says.

I was at a law review meeting. This was in the days before cell phones, but he had the number for the law review offices. He called that number, and someone found me and told me there was a phone call for me.

Embarrassed at the interruption, I went to take the call from hubby. When I picked up the receiver, he asked me to take him to the student health center to get patched up.

“I can’t leave,” I whispered to him. We were in the middle of some important law review business—I think we were deciding the inductees from the next year’s class. I wanted to have my say. I didn’t see how the wastepaper can could have hurt him that badly. It would take me half an hour to walk home, get him, drive him to the student center . . . even if I just dropped him off and returned for him later, to repeat the experience to get him back to the apartment.

“Fine,” he said, in the wounded voice that a disappointed spouse uses. And somehow he got himself to the health center, where his injury was washed and wrapped and he seemed almost as good as new when I got home.

But he never let me forget my delinquency as a spouse. He still mentions it occasionally, over forty years later.

What relics have you carried from one residence to the next?