Just Because flowers in Mesa

There is a Mesa ritual that explains this occasion better than any greeting-card language could. Every spring a sizeable share of the city leaves - the winter visitors drive back to Minnesota and Alberta, the part-year residents close up casitas in the resort communities, and families with somewhere cooler to be go there for July. The people who stay spend the summer watering somebody else's citrus tree, collecting somebody else's mail, and checking that somebody else's air conditioning is still running. Then in October and November the city refills, and flowers move across Mesa in both directions: thank-yous to the neighbor who kept the yard alive, welcome-backs to the people who just pulled in off the interstate. That is a just-because order in its purest form - no anniversary, no birthday, no bad news, just a reason that would sound thin if you said it out loud and lands perfectly when it shows up at a door. The rest of the volume on this page is the same shape: a mid-week delivery to a parent who lives alone, a thank-you to a teacher, a note to a friend who has had a rough month, an apology, or a habit somebody keeps because it makes a Wednesday better.

The logistics are the easiest of any occasion here, and the reason is the street layout. Mesa runs on a mile grid - Dobson, Alma School, Country Club, Mesa Drive, Stapley, Gilbert, Lindsay, Val Vista, Greenfield, Higley, Recker, Power, Sossaman, Ellsworth and Signal Butte north to south; McKellips, Brown, University, Main, Broadway, Southern, Baseline, Guadalupe, Elliot, Warner, Ray, Williams Field and Pecos east to west - so a driver leaving one of the shops covers four or five stops on a single road without a single confusing turn. A Tuesday loop out of the Baseline corridor might take in a bungalow in 85201 downtown, a lakeside street in Dobson Ranch in 85202, a house near the Fiesta district, an Alta Mesa address in 85205, a Superstition Springs address in 85206 or 85208, an Augusta Ranch street in 85209, and finish in Eastmark in 85212 where the streets are newer than the maps. North Mesa adds the Lehi neighborhood in 85203 and 85213, up near the Salt River bottom, and the Red Mountain streets in 85215. None of that is difficult driving. What makes or breaks the delivery is whether somebody is there to take it, which in this climate is not a small question.