Just Because flowers in Hicksville

Hicksville was named after a Quaker called Valentine Hicks, who laid it out in 1834 and later ran the Long Island Rail Road, and for a few years in the late 1830s this was where the railroad simply stopped — the end of the line, a terminus in the middle of farmland. A century later the farmland went under houses in one decade, and what the hamlet has now is a grid of capes, splits and ranches with about sixty thousand people in it, a commuter platform that takes on more passengers than any other station on the Island bar the city terminals, and almost no ceremony anywhere. Which is exactly why the no-occasion order works so well here. Nothing in Hicksville is staged. A bouquet arriving on a Tuesday at a house on Woodbury Road, with no birthday and no apology behind it, is the most conspicuous thing that will happen on that street all week. If you have been waiting for a reason, the absence of one is the reason.

Who gets a just-because bouquet in Hicksville is fairly predictable and almost always right. A grandparent in the house the family bought in the fifties — the hamlet has a lot of those, and a plant on a kitchen windowsill off South Oyster Bay Road or West Nicholai Street gets looked at daily. A teacher: Hicksville Public Schools runs the high school, the middle school and the district's elementary buildings, and Holy Trinity Diocesan High School sits on Cherry Lane, and every one of those front offices will hold a delivery at the desk with a name on it. A front desk or a shift supervisor: there is more of this hamlet at work than people assume. Processing floors sit on Duffy Avenue below the railroad; warehouses and small manufacturers line New South Road and Engineers Drive; PSEG Long Island runs an operations site on East Old Country Road; and Broadway Commons, opened as Mid-Island Plaza in 1956 and now containing the only IKEA on Long Island, keeps several hundred people on shift. A doctor's or dentist's office after a long course of appointments. And a new neighbour: Hicksville turns over slowly, so the family that just moved in three doors down is going to remember whoever knocked first.

Two logistics facts shape the ordinary run. The first is the calendar. Roughly ten weeks of the year — call it mid-June to Labor Day — the heat and the humidity here will finish a vase arrangement standing in direct sun long before anyone gets home to it, and roughly ten weeks at the other end of the year the same square of concrete is glazed with ice. On either of those days a driver takes the vessel to a sheltered side entrance or brings it back, and since almost every house in this hamlet has that sheltered side entrance, the fix costs you one sentence on the order. The second is the Broadway light. NY 106 and NY 107 run together as Broadway straight through the centre of the hamlet and cross Old Country Road at the busiest intersection in town; between three and six a van crossing it twice can lose twenty minutes to nothing at all. Order before noon and the whole problem disappears. And on any unannounced delivery, a mobile number matters more than the address — nobody is expecting this one, so nobody is watching the door.