Flowers for Molena, GA

There are towns you drive to and towns you slow down for, and Molena is the second kind — about four hundred people, a downtown chartered in 1905 that has settled into a row of antique shops and a couple of storefronts, and roads that head off in every direction toward the rest of Pike County. Zebulon, the county seat, is a short run east; Concord and Meansville sit close by; Thomaston and Barnesville are the nearest towns with much of a Main Street. Flowers here move on that rural rhythm. There is no hospital in town, so get-well orders travel the highway up to Griffin, and sympathy work follows families to churches and chapels in Zebulon and Barnesville. In between are the everyday reasons — a birthday on an antique-row porch, an anniversary for a couple who have farmed the same land for decades, a thank-you left with a neighbor.

Other Georgia cities.