Sympathy flowers in Lincoln

The geography of a Lincoln funeral is worth explaining, because it surprises people who have never sent here. Lincoln is a city of tens of thousands of residents with a very old age profile — Sun City Lincoln Hills, the age-restricted Del Webb community on the east side, runs to several thousand homes on its own and is one of the largest of its kind in Northern California — and yet the city itself has very little mortuary and cemetery capacity. What follows is that the great majority of Lincoln services are held somewhere else: in Roseville and Rocklin down Highway 65, in Auburn up State Route 193 in the foothills, north in Marysville and Yuba City, or south in the Sacramento area. All of that is inside the widened 60-mile radius this market runs on, so the delivery is not the problem — the addressing is. Give us the chapel or church by name and street, not just the city, and tell us whether the flowers are for a viewing, for the service itself or for a graveside. Those are three different times and sometimes three different buildings on the same day. The drive matters too: Highway 65 through Rocklin and Roseville backs up hard in both peaks, State Route 193 to Auburn is a two-lane foothill road that nobody makes up time on, and in winter the tule fog that settles on the valley floor can hold the Wheatland and Marysville runs until mid-morning. A driver planning a ten o'clock chapel arrival in January is leaving Lincoln a good deal earlier than the mileage suggests.