Just Because flowers in Bowling Green

The everyday map of this city is worth knowing, because a no-occasion delivery goes to whatever house somebody actually lives in rather than to a venue. The older half of Bowling Green — the streets around downtown, Fairview Avenue, the blocks under the Hill in 42101 — still has real porches, deep and shaded, which is the best possible place to leave an arrangement when nobody answers. East through 42103, along Cave Mill Road and the Lovers Lane corridor, the houses are newer and the porches are shallower, and half of them face west into an afternoon sun that is brutal from June to September. South through 42104, off Campbell Lane, Three Springs Road, Greenwood and Gary Farms, is the fastest-growing part of the city and the part where a driver most needs a visible house number, because the subdivisions came in quickly and the street signs came in after. Out past the city line — Alvaton 42122, Oakland, Rockfield, Woodburn, Smiths Grove — describe the driveway and the colour of the house; the mailbox out there is often a quarter-mile from where anybody lives.

The thank-you version of this occasion is bigger in Bowling Green than the romantic version, and most of it runs through front offices. Warren County and Bowling Green Independent schools take flowers at the office and never at a classroom door — Bowling Green High School, the one everybody in town still calls the Purples, plus Greenwood, South Warren, Warren Central and Warren East — so the order wants the teacher's name and the school, and the office pages them at a break rather than interrupting a lesson. On the Hill, WKU department offices in Cherry Hall, Van Meter and the buildings around the Downing Student Union take deliveries through the business day, which is how most retirement and thank-you arrangements reach faculty and staff. The nurses at 800 Park Street and at TriStar Greenview on Ashley Circle get sent flowers by families who have just been through something, and that is a station delivery rather than a patient one — say plainly in the notes that it is for the unit, not for a room, or the desk will hunt for a patient who is not there.

What people here actually send no-reason flowers for is specific to a growing small city. Somebody closes on a first house in one of the new streets off Three Springs Road and the flowers are a housewarming. A neighbour brush-hogs your ditch line after a storm. A friend makes the drive down I-65 to Nashville and back with you for an appointment, because the serious hospitals are an hour away and somebody always has to drive. A daughter in Louisville sends something to her mother in Alvaton in February for no stated reason at all. Retirements come off the line at the Corvette plant and out of the school district in waves each spring. And this is a town that likes its own small mythology — the white squirrels that ended up naming a local brewery, the Saturday market downtown, a Hot Rods game on a warm evening, the Corvette caravans rolling in past the museum — all of which is to say Bowling Green is sentimental about ordinary things, which is exactly the temperament that makes a Wednesday bouquet land well.