I live in northern Virginia, which is sort of cold in winter and sort of hot in the summer. So it’s not completely necessary, but awfully nice.

But, this is worth remarking, my favorite line of all week:

“from away” (is that redundant?)

Garages are out of sight, out of mind, making it easy to put off sorting out the stuff dumped there. Then, eventually, you grow tired of the car barely fitting, so you park outside, creating more space for the chaos. Or better yet, you use the car spots as space for sorting which never gets finished, nor does anything actually get carried off. It only gets altered in the spring to dig out the lawnmower and in the early winter to dig out the snowblower. Big efforts come in mid-winter in the north after you grow reminiscent of being able to empty the car in a dry place out of the wind. This all presupposes the garage isn’t taken over as a shop.

But nowadays, many people also have snowblowers, weed whackers, leaf blowers, rototillers, table saws, etc., not to mention decades worth of accumulated junk. So there is no room left for the car! Today, if you have one car, you really need a two-car garage in order to have all that stuff and still have a place to put the car.

Of course, families today have two, three, or more cars. 🙂

I live by myself and have one car, and this past winter I was finally able to clean out the garage enough to put my car inside when snow was predicted. But most of the time I leave it in the driveway.

Usually vehicles are parked in the driveway or the road in front of the house (where my truck is) and a single person wide pathway is available through the garage door to the door leading into the house. Rarely are we able to get at more than just what is next to the pathway unless really motivated (we are lucky enough to also have a pathway to a storage area under out split foyer so we get an extra pathway).

Indeed, it is not uncommon to note junk stacked completely to the ceiling. We aren’t that bad – more because our junk doesn’t stack too well and tends to pile up.

There are a few oddballs – the people down the street from us have a full entertainment room in their garage and seem to be full of acquaintances of the evening (which is unusual in and of itself). There are also the garage based woodworking shops, our next door neighbor has one – I would *LOVE* to have one also. Yet most are garage’s for storing junk that we will almost never use and our vehicles on the driveway or road.

But then once outside of the cities I find the South-East Redneck Capital has more in common with North-East Liberal Crazy than not, just the motivations are different.