An ice storm this past January cut power to more than 230,000 Middle Tennessee homes, and some of them stayed dark for more than two weeks. A few things in some of those houses worked the whole time. These are the grandparent habits Tennessee families mock right up until they don’t. 1. Line-Drying the Laundry…
Pabst says close to 90% of every National Bohemian can sold stays inside Maryland, most of it in Baltimore. The beer barely leaves the state. But Marylanders do, and they carry a set of habits with them. These are the things that give a Marylander away the moment they leave the state. 1. Old Bay,…
A Salvation Farms study estimated Vermont farms left roughly 14 million pounds of edible food unharvested or unsold in a single year. Some of it gets picked anyway, by people who don’t own the field. Nobody advertises where that food goes, and the leaf routes run right past all of it. These are the things…
Every generation leaves its mark on the way Alabama sounds. Some once-familiar expressions now survive mainly in family stories, old conversations, and the occasional sentence that makes a young listener stop and stare. These are the old Alabama expressions younger Alabamians rarely use anymore. 1. Buggy Many Alabamians still call a grocery cart a buggy….
Indiana has kept beer in every gas station and grocery store cooler warm since 1963, and the courts have upheld that rule every time somebody sued. Illinois has no such rule. These are the things that change the second you cross from Indiana into Illinois. Note: This is general information, not legal or tax advice….
Michigan’s transportation department says the Michigan Left reduces crashes at those intersections by 30% to 60%. Few other states build them, which is why a Michigander driving elsewhere keeps looking for one, mostly without luck. These are the signs someone was raised in Michigan, no matter where they live now. 1. Mitten Hand Map Every…
A West Virginia driver’s odds of hitting a deer sit at 1 in 40 this year, against 1 in 139 for the average American driver, per State Farm. The state has led the country in that for more than a decade. A mountain town after dark isn’t a quieter version of itself, and the deer…
Vermont’s early records put the first town meeting in a Bennington tavern in 1762, decades before Vermont was a state. That meeting never stopped. More than two centuries later, it still runs on rules that stop a first-time visitor cold, and none of them have been modernized out. These are the things that happen at…
A resold table at Funke in Beverly Hills once listed for $125 on a site built for flipping restaurant reservations. Funke never saw a dollar of it. California’s Assembly and Senate passed a bill banning the practice by unanimous vote in late August, which tells you how tired everyone is of it. These are the…
More than 152,000 people moved into Massachusetts from other states in a single year, per Boston.com’s read of Census data. Nobody hands any of them a manual. They sign a lease, register a car, and come to realize things work differently than the state they’re from. These are the things that confuse everyone who moves…
