Sunnymead Boulevard is the main street of a town that no longer exists under its own name. Moreno Valley was assembled in December 1984 out of three separate communities - Sunnymead, Moreno and Edgemont - and the old commercial spine of Sunnymead is still the street everything hangs off. That is a useful thing to know when you are sending flowers for no reason at all, because a just-because delivery is not aimed at a venue. It is aimed at a house, and the houses here are laid out along a handful of long arterials that our drivers know by feel: Sunnymead Boulevard and Alessandro Boulevard running east and west, Perris Boulevard and Heacock Street and Day Street crossing them, Iris Avenue and Cactus Avenue and Cottonwood and Ironwood stacked south of the SR-60, Lasselle Street and Kitching Street and Nason Street heading out east, Moreno Beach Drive at the far edge, and Pigeon Pass Road climbing north into the hills below Box Springs Mountain. A just-because order is the easiest delivery in this city and the most likely to actually land well, because there is no service time to hit and no ceremony to be late for.
The reasons people send these here are ordinary and specific. A thank-you to the neighbor who watched the dogs or moved a trash can during a Santa Ana wind week. A new-neighbor bouquet in one of the newer eastern tracts through Rancho Belago, where whole streets fill in at once and nobody knows anybody for the first year. A teacher at a Moreno Valley Unified or Val Verde Unified campus, or a professor at Moreno Valley College on Lasselle Street - both route through a front office rather than a classroom, and the arrangement waits there for end-of-day pickup. A grandparent in one of the assisted-living or skilled-nursing communities in the city or over in Riverside and Perris, where a front desk takes it up to the room and a room number is genuinely required. A Sunday delivery to a mother or an aunt after church, which in practice means ordering Saturday, because Sunday coverage on a five-studio grid is limited. And the plain no-reason Tuesday send to a partner or a friend, which is the one people are shyest about and the one that consistently lands hardest, because nothing on the calendar explains it.
Two practical constraints shape every everyday delivery in this valley. The first is heat, and it is not a minor detail. Moreno Valley sits at roughly 1,600 feet in a basin with Box Springs Mountain closing the northwest and the Badlands rising on the east, and from June into September afternoons routinely pass 100 degrees. An arrangement left on a south or west-facing step at three in the afternoon is visibly damaged inside an hour - the open stems go first. Ask for a morning window, give us a mobile number so the driver can knock or call rather than leaving it, and if the recipient lives behind a gate out east off Moreno Beach Drive or Nason, include the code. Apartment corridors along Alessandro, Sunnymead and Perris Boulevard will almost always take a delivery at the leasing office, which is the most reliable handoff in the city. The second constraint is who is home. Moreno Valley commutes - a great many households are empty from before seven until after six. Send to whoever is actually there, send to a workplace with a receiving desk, or send in the morning and let the flowers be waiting. For an Inland Empire house, ask for material that holds in dry air and intermittent watering; a compact vase design in an air-conditioned room will outlast anything delicate, and a plant will outlast them both.