More than a decade ago, I published my sole entry to date in the niche genre of garbage dumpster love stories, about a man named Booger who professed his love for Sissy on a dumpster near the small town of Satartia, Mississippi.
For many reasons, Booger’s decision to spray paint “Booger ❤️ Sissy” on a nontraditional canvas struck me as both weird and poignant. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it also prompted me to research the back story.
Booger’s dumpster message was essentially a 1990s precursor to an Instagram post, incorporating a hand-drawn heart emoji and addressed to Sissy yet announced in the public domain. His choice of medium was located just north of the village of Satartia, on the southern edge of the Mississippi Delta, beside a crossroads cottonfield.
Whether Booger’s intent was to proclaim his love to the world or to surprise Sissy on her next garbage run, his message caught the attention of my friend Steve Bingham as he was driving to the nearby Delta National Forest, and he later told me about it.
“Who professes their love on a dumpster?” Steve wondered, then answered his own question: “A guy named Booger.” He pronounced Booger “possibly the most romantic dumpster graffiti artist in Yazoo County.”
Several years after that, another friend and I happened to be in Satartia and decided to see whether Booger’s proclamation was still there. Alas, by then it had either faded away or been painted over. Both the message and the relationship -- as subsequent interviews revealed – were ephemeral.
Two women working in Satartia’s one surviving store told us that Booger and Sissy were definitely no longer a thing and filled us in on a few details that were sketchy yet tantalizing. It seemed unacceptable to us that Booger’s locally famous roadside ode might eventually be forgotten, so someone – I’m not saying who – bought a can of spray paint and restored the amorous installation. This, with the awareness that its reappearance so long after the original could, conceivably, spark minor controversy, as in a spouse demanding to know whether the long-lost love had been rekindled. But whatever, a minor burst of ardor was thus reclaimed from the infinite continuum of time.
Later that day, my friend Chris conducted an unplanned interview with a purported relative of Booger’s, whom he serendipitously encountered at a different dumpster, and who, according to Chris, said Booger now had a life partner who most assuredly did not go by the name Sissy. All of which I recounted in a 2011 blog post.
Fast-forward to March 2024: Another friend emailed me out of the blue with an image he had taken of the original dumpster, circa 1999, and a few days later, another friend – unrelated to the first and without knowing what he had sent – emailed me a photo of her own depicting another iteration of the message, from 2013. Notably, the message in the second image was a facsimile of the one recreated two years prior, meaning there were at least three Booger ❤️ Sissy versions, seemingly all created by different people, over the course of about 15 years. For some reason, this was now reentering the discourse.
I could not account for the recent resurgence of activity among our small yet steadfast cohort, which Steve describes as “BLS enthusiasts,” and I wondered what had prompted it and what it might say about the message’s staying power. I asked my friend Arthur Minton what had inspired him to email the circa 1999 pic and he wrote back to say that he had recently bought a photo scanner and recalled my story when he came across the image in a box.
“Your piece on the dumpster years ago struck a chord with me, but I wasn’t sure I had a picture of it,” he wrote, adding that he and his son had come upon the original dumpster while on a duck hunting expedition in the area. “I’m frequently impressed and amazed with the circular nature of the universe,” Arthur observed. He felt that the enduring – or recurring — dumpster message was an example of that.
The photographer of the 2013 image, Princella Nowell, who lives in Greenville, Mississippi, said the Booger love Sissy story simply came to mind as a result of our renewed communications following a hiatus of several years. So, the paired offerings were coincidental. The universe had randomly reintroduced Booger ❤️ Sissy into our shared worlds.
Princella said she used to pass the dumpster when driving back roads to Jackson and posted her image of Booger’s message (or a facsimile of it) on social media on Valentine’s Day 2013. She had accidentally clipped the image in the version she sent me, which removes its context and gives it the look of a meme.
What Princella documented was actually a second redux, as is evident when comparing it with its antecedents. It is clearly written in different handwriting and incorporates an incorrect apostrophe-S after the image of the heart.
When I alerted Steve to these new details and shared the images, he said seeing Arthur’s original – Steve had never photographed it -- was like coming across an old friend. He was a bit chagrined by the punctuation in the 2013 version.
“Booger’s implied subject-verb disagreement with the plain heart is a critical part of the whole,” Steve suggested. The message, he said, would properly read “Booger love Sissy,” certainly not “Booger love’s Sissy.” He added, “I hope the apostrophe-s was a copycat’s inadvertent correction and not a conscious act of grammar policing.” This was characteristically generous of Steve. I personally tend to harshly judge the incorrect use of the possessive when what’s called for is the plural or, in this case, the present tense.
I hasten to point out that I have never spoken with the relevant Booger or Sissy. I gathered my original intel from the women at the store and from my friend Chris’s later reported conversation with a man whom he said was Booger’s brother, which took place later that day at a different dumpster. As a result, I cannot vouch for any of the background details. I simply asked around. After someone from within the Satartia Booger/Sissy realm read my original story, I felt obliged to retroactively delete some of the more colorful details related to Booger’s romantic history, owing to privacy concerns and to the questionable veracity of the source.
A recent online search for variations of Booger + love + Sissy returned two citations: my 2011 post and an unrelated 2004 obit from Maryland that illustrates a second, similarly obscure subset, of people who address long-running personal commentaries to deceased loved ones using the condolences chat-function on a funeral home website. In this case, it involved a different Booger/Sissy pair, with this Sissy writing long letters to her Booger over an extended period of time.
It is worth noting that Booger ❤️ Sissy was not the only cryptic message we happened upon on Yazoo County dumpsters. Elsewhere, we passed one emblazoned with the words, “The Holy Grail is inside,” which: If it was, I didn’t see it. On numerous other county dumpsters, someone who appears to have been a punctuationally-challenged county worker, who confused question marks with exclamation points, warned against placing anything inside other than household trash with the words “NO LIMBS?” All over rural Yazoo County, the same disquieting question was repeatedly posed.
A 2022 article in the Yazoo Herald reported that the county was hiring a “solid waste officer” to patrol and issue citations for various violations at local dumpsters, which the article said were being used to illegally dispose of unauthorized debris and were subject to litter as a result of dumpster diving. Some dumpsters had also been reportedly destroyed by fires that were purposely set. Graffiti was not cited among the more pressing concerns.
A follow-up story from 2023 reported that the dumpster patrol had issued five citations, and my first thought was: Please, tell me more!
I have to say I can think of worse ways to spend a day than patrolling Yazoo County dumpsters with a solid waste officer, to see the world from that vantage point and hear interesting dumpster stories and observations. But then, I am a BLS kind of guy.
In a postscript, reader R.L. Nave offered his take on this story: “In a world of Dumpster fires... one man... and one woman... find love...”
Which was apparently true for a minute. What we have now is this odd little echo.
Or, as Steve Bingham put it, Booger’s message may not have had a lasting effect, but the rest of us are still celebrating his “pièce de résistance” 25 years on.
Notes
Images: the dumpster in 1999, courtesy Arthur Minton; in 2013, courtesy Princella Nowell; in 2011, by the author
I remember you telling me about Booger ♥️ Sissy and showing me a pic. It’s interesting to find out the rest of the story. I’m sorry about Booger/Sissy, I’m sure they had some stories to tell!