The residential side of Mobile breaks into pieces that behave differently, and the differences are physical. Oakleigh Garden District — Marine, Savannah, George and Palmetto — is antebellum and Victorian cottages set almost on the sidewalk, no driveway, street parking only, which means a driver parks two doors down and carries. De Tonti Square and Church Street East downtown are brick and iron with stoops and locked side gates, and a gate code in the notes saves a phone call. Midtown off Old Shell Road and along the Dauphin Street corridor has the deep shaded porches every florist wants — leave-at-door works there. Spring Hill, up around Spring Hill College and Old Shell, hides house numbers behind hedges and long drives under live oaks, so a landmark description beats a number. West Mobile off Cottage Hill Road and Schillinger Road is subdivisions with call boxes and keypads. South of the shop on Three Notch Road the route runs through Tillmans Corner and out to Theodore; north it runs Chickasaw, Saraland and Satsuma up Highway 43 and Shelton Beach Road, which is Belle Bouquet's own street. And then there are the long ones that eat an afternoon: Grand Bay, Irvington, Bayou La Batre and Coden down in the seafood end of the county, and Dauphin Island, thirty-odd miles south down Highway 193 and over the bridge, where one delivery is effectively the driver's whole trip.
Weather is not small talk on a Mobile birthday order. This city records more rain in an average year than any other major city in the continental United States — on the order of sixty-six inches — and a great deal of it arrives as a hard afternoon thunderstorm that shows up at roughly the same hour all summer. Paper wrap, a card and a bow do not survive that. Heat is the other half: a wrapped bouquet standing on an uncovered concrete step at two in the afternoon in July, in Gulf humidity, is limp inside ninety minutes and dead by the time somebody gets home from work. Both problems have the same fix, and it is one line in the delivery notes: covered porch, carport side door, or a named neighbor. A mobile number for the recipient is worth more here than anywhere else, since a reply to one text tells the driver which side of the house has shade at that hour. From June into November there is a third factor — when a named storm is in the Gulf, the whole route changes, stores close early, and a birthday that has to beat a landfall should be ordered a day ahead rather than same-day. A hard frost is rare enough to ignore most winters, but the reverse is not: a January cold snap here will burn tender petals left out overnight just as effectively as August will cook them.