Garage sitting

ga∙rage sit∙ting noun \gə-ˈräzh, -ˈräj ‘sit-ting : phenomenon in which people sit on lawn chairs in the shelter of a building or part of a building in which a car, truck, etc., is normally kept

There are front porches up north. People sit on them watching the world go by, smoking outside to keep their houses clean.  If you walk around the neighborhood, you can bet these folks will be out.  They count on passersby to keep life interesting, and they’re a fine source of neighborhood news.

 

“How’s it going, Don?” 

“Can’t complain, hon!  You’re the best thing I’ve seen all week.  You hear Ed died?”

In Florida, many folks have a screen-porch lanai in back, where they can sit outside to smoke and keep their houses clean.  It might even look out on a canal.  But many others don’t have a lanai.

At some point when they began building homes in the South, they omitted the New England front porch, more’s the pity.  This left southerners to their own devices, and garage sitting was born. 

Just like porch sitters, garage sitters gaze out on the street to see the world go by.

I can bet on Joe being out in his garage every day.  The garage door lifts around 8:30 a.m. and there he is, at a card table surrounded by four or five plastic lawn chairs. Sometimes Joe sits there alone, gazing out on the street.  Sometimes a card game with his buddies is in full swing.  

I asked Joe, “What’s this thing with sitting in your garage?  I get the no-smoking-in-the-house deal, but what else?”

He goes, “Come in and I’ll show you.”

Turns out his house is laid out awkwardly. It has a lovely, but totally enclosed, lanai, in which there’s no way one can smoke while looking out on the canal.  

The point is: We are drawn to that space in our homes where we feel the most comfortable.

In New Hampshire we had a homey sunken living room, with a fireplace, which convinced us to buy the house in the first place.  We spent no time there.  In the summer our comfort zone was the sun room off the back deck, in the piney woods, where skunks and wild turkeys and Amtrak passed by. In the winter, comfort was a rocker by the woodstove with a cat in your lap. 

Joe’s 6-year-old grandson has adorned a steel cabinet in the garage with “MAN CAVE” and various happy-face stickers.  This is his comfort zone, as it is Joe’s. Inside the house, on the other hand, long-haired shag carpet crawls all over--of which Joe’s grandson says, somewhat fearfully, “If I drop something, it better be on the tiles, grampa, or I’ll never be able to find it again.” They prefer the garage.

Earl and Sheila have a lovely whitewashed garden bench in the shade on their front lawn, and a red bucket bench with heart cutouts.  They never use them. When smoking relatives show up for a visit, they all sit in lawn chairs in the garage, waving howdy to passersby.

Grace sits out in her garage in a green-webbed lawn chair squeezed between a stack of garage junk and her car.   She doesn’t even have a tray table for her ashtray.

And one family in the neighborhood has raised garage sitting to new heights. When they’re open for business, the screened garage door affords a view of a fully furnished family room with exercise bike, leather couches, and a 72-inch wall-mounted TV playing movies and news all day long.