A large share of the sympathy orders that come to Harlingen are placed by people who have never been here. The reason is seasonal: from November through March this city's population swells with winter Texans living in RV resorts off Expressway 83 and Business 77, and when one of them dies in Harlingen the family is in Minnesota, Michigan, Iowa, Manitoba or Ontario, the body is going north, and what happens locally is a memorial gathering in the resort's clubhouse among the friends the couple wintered beside for fifteen years. Those sends have their own shape. The room is a clubhouse, not a chapel, so an easel piece is often wrong and a low table arrangement or a substantial potted plant is right — the plant in particular, because someone in the park will keep it after the family flies home. Ordering from out of state, give us the resort name, the date and hour of the gathering, and a phone number for whoever is organizing it, usually a park activities director or a neighbor. The resort office will accept and hold, and it will know where the gathering is even when the caller in Wisconsin does not. We can also deliver to the couple's own pad if the spouse is still in the park — write the site or lot number, because a four-hundred-pad resort has no street addresses inside it.
The other Harlingen sympathy pattern is a two-stop delivery down US 77. Services here are frequently held at a Harlingen chapel while the burial goes to Mont Meta Memorial Park, which sits on the expressway between San Benito and Brownsville — twelve or so miles south of downtown Harlingen, an easy run but not the same address as the chapel. If you are sending one piece, decide which room it belongs in: the chapel, where people read the cards, or the graveside, where the family stands for twenty minutes. If you are sending two, say so explicitly, because otherwise both go to the same place. Buck-Ashcraft Funeral Home is the long-established Harlingen chapel. Thomae-Garza Funeral Home handles San Benito, and it sits on South Sam Houston Boulevard, the same boulevard as Rosalba's Flower Shop a few blocks along — geographically that is the shortest sympathy run on this whole grid. Darling-Mouser Funeral Home in Brownsville is inside the widened radius to the south. West on Expressway 83 we reach the Weslaco and Mercedes chapels, and forty miles out in Mission is the Rio Grande Valley State Veterans Cemetery, one of Texas's state veterans cemeteries, which matters here because Harlingen is a military town in a quiet way — the VA Health Care Center on Treasure Hills Boulevard, Marine Military Academy on the north side, and a generation of Valley families with service in them.