9 Things People From Massachusetts Miss Most After They Leave

Somewhere outside Massachusetts, an office keeps humming along on the third Monday of April like it’s any other Monday.

Back home, that same Monday means a marathon runs past Fenway Park and school lets out early.

These are the things people from Massachusetts miss the most once they’ve left the state.

1. Space Savers After a Snowstorm

Boston turns a shoveled-out parking spot into a small piece of property the moment the plow passes, and many Massachusetts residents recognize the custom even though the rule itself never leaves the city line.

Nobody touches the chair.

Dig out a spot after a snow emergency in Boston, and the city’s own rule gives you 48 hours to hold it with a chair, a cone, or whatever’s handy before it’s fair game again.

That rule only came about in 2005, after years of feuds over whose spot was whose.

Transplants explain the whole system to new neighbors like it’s normal. In Greater Boston, it is.

Somewhere warmer, a folding chair on the street just looks like litter.

2. Marathon Monday

Massachusetts closes schools and empties many offices for Marathon Monday, while the rest of the country works straight through the third Monday of April.

Patriots’ Day is an official day off in both Massachusetts and Maine.

The marathon isn’t.

Maine’s state employees get an ordinary Monday off the calendar.

Massachusetts gets 26.2 miles of runners leaving Hopkinton before noon, a Fenway Park game that lets out just as the leaders pass nearby, and a city that stops what it’s doing to watch.

The Boston Marathon joined the holiday’s celebrations in 1897, a year after organizers watched the marathon debut at the first modern Olympics and decided Boston needed a marathon of its own.

Ask a coworker from somewhere else why the date matters, and the blank look says everything Maine’s day off can’t.

3. Fluffernutter Sandwiches

Outsiders can’t quite believe it’s real: Peanut butter and marshmallow creme between two slices of bread is a Massachusetts invention.

A confectioner named Archibald Query started selling marshmallow creme door to door out of Somerville in 1917, and the recipe eventually became Marshmallow Fluff.

Kids grew up on it.

Fluff is still made in Lynn.

The fluffernutter still shows up in Massachusetts lunchboxes the way peanut butter and jelly does everywhere else.

Ask for a fluffernutter in another state, and a server usually asks if you’re joking.

You’re not.

4. Calling Something Wicked

“Wicked good” counts as Massachusetts’s highest compliment, an intensifier the state never got around to filing down.

It doesn’t translate.

The word itself is shared: wicked shows up as an intensifier chiefly in Maine and Massachusetts, and almost nowhere else in the country.

But Massachusetts is the state that exported it.

Good Will Hunting and a run of other Boston-set films turned “wicked” into shorthand for a Massachusetts accent, a spotlight Maine’s version of the word never got.

By 1981, Seventeen magazine had to explain the word to its own readers, spelling out that “wicked” didn’t mean evil, it meant “very.”

Move away, and the word slips out at the worst possible times, like a job interview or a first date, earning a confused laugh every time.

You say it anyway.

5. Not Owning a Car

Boston opened the first subway tunnel in North America, and Massachusetts has been riding under its own streets ever since.

No car, no problem.

The Tremont Street line opened in 1897, the same year the Boston Marathon joined Patriots’ Day.

Its original tunnel still carries trains today.

Grow up riding the T. A car starts to feel optional.

Move to a place built around highways, and a car stops being optional. It becomes mandatory.

The monthly bill stings in a way a T pass never did.

One flat fee on that pass covered unlimited rides on the subway, the local bus, and the Silver Line, no separate ticket needed for any of them.

6. Triple-Deckers Full of Family

Massachusetts builders put up roughly 15,000 triple-decker houses between 1880 and 1930, stacking three separate apartments into one narrow frame.

Families used them to house three generations under one roof, one floor apiece.

Grandma lived downstairs.

Growing up in a triple-decker meant a grandparent or an aunt was always one flight of stairs away, close enough to borrow sugar or drop off a kid for the afternoon.

Moving away usually means trading that shared porch for a house where the nearest relative is a plane ride away.

Nobody’s downstairs anymore.

7. Ordering a Regular

Order a regular at a Massachusetts coffee counter, and the term doesn’t mean what it sounds like.

The cup comes back with cream and sugar already stirred in, no follow-up questions asked.

Everyone just knows.

Order the same thing anywhere else, and a barista usually hands over a plain black coffee, unsure what else to add.

One Boston.com reader learned that the hard way after ordering a regular in the South, where a barista handed back a coffee with nothing in it.

Back home, that never happens.

8. Cheering for All Four Teams

Massachusetts fans get to cheer for four professional teams that all know what winning feels like.

Boston’s four major teams combined for 12 championships between 2000 and 2019 alone.

The Celtics added an 18th banner in 2024, keeping the trophy case full.

That’s an absurd run.

A city with just one good team and a lot of rebuilding seasons feels different fast.

Sundays feel emptier without a team worth watching.

9. Cape Cod Summer Weekends

Every summer Friday, Massachusetts empties out toward its own coastline, and Cape Cod takes in a large share of the crowd.

Nobody minds the wait.

Traffic backs up for five miles on the roads feeding the Bourne and Sagamore bridges on a typical summer weekend.

Everybody still goes anyway.

A weekend on the Cape means a cooler packed the night before, a rental with sandy floors no matter how many times someone sweeps, and a drive home Sunday night that takes twice as long as it should.

Somewhere else, a beach trip means a plane ticket and a hotel reservation booked months out.

On the Cape, it just means a Friday afternoon and a full tank of gas.