Birthday flowers in Huntington

The two largest workplaces in town are hospitals, so more Huntington birthday orders are workplace deliveries than people expect — often to somebody who spends the day looking after other people. Cabell Huntington Hospital stands on Hal Greer Boulevard, a street that was 16th Street until the city renamed it for Hal Greer, the Huntington kid who broke the colour line on Marshall's basketball team and left for a Hall of Fame career in Philadelphia. St. Mary's Medical Center is across town at 2900 First Avenue, which is to say at the bottom of the same 29th Street the florist works from. Nursing units hand off at seven, morning and night; a bouquet that lands at 6:45 either way gets parked in a corridor during report and nobody claims it. Mid-morning or mid-afternoon is the window, and the order needs a unit name, because a floor number is not an address inside either building. Marshall University generates the other steady run of desk drops: Old Main, the Drinko Library, the Memorial Student Center and the medical campus all receive through a departmental office rather than at a classroom door, and the campus keeps its own ZIP, 25755. Downtown, the Fifth Avenue civic block — City Hall, the Cabell County Courthouse, the Sidney L. Christie Federal Building — runs on a lobby desk and a metal detector, so flowers are signed for on the ground floor and walked up by a colleague. Industrial shifts are their own problem: the CSX locomotive shops, the nickel-alloy works the city still calls Huntington Alloys, and Steel of West Virginia's mill in the west end are fronted by gatehouses rather than receptionists, and a gatehouse will hold a bouquet for an hour, not for a shift.

The rest of the work is porches, and Huntington has a great many of them. Around Ritter Park and Enslow Park the Southside blocks carry deep brick porches where an arrangement sits out of the weather under the sycamores along Fourpole Creek. West of downtown, toward Camden Park on the old trolley line, the porches are wooden and close to the sidewalk — easy to reach and easy to see from the street, which is exactly why a surprise gets handed over rather than left in plain view. In the east end, Altizer and Guyandotte sit low near the river mouth where the numbered streets give out and older lanes take over, and house numbers thin. Out the Route 60 corridor through Pea Ridge, Barboursville, Ona and Milton the addressing turns suburban: subdivisions, clustered mailboxes, driveways long enough that the doorbell is the only thing that works. Then comes the part of this radius no grid can help with. A Wayne County address up a creek road off Route 152, or a Lincoln County address off Route 10, can be a mile of gravel past the last visible number, and the only navigation that holds is the recipient's mobile number in the delivery notes. Two local conditions move the timing. Shift work is ordinary here, so the birthday recipient may be asleep at two in the afternoon behind closed blinds — say so, and the knock is soft and the hand-off polite instead of a hammering at the door. And in January the hill streets ice while the flat blocks below them are merely wet, so a Beverly Hills or Washington Boulevard address goes out later in the run rather than first.