Just Because flowers in Morgantown

The most common just-because order in Morgantown goes to somebody older, living alone, who did not leave when everyone else did. West Virginia has the oldest population of any state in the country, and Morgantown's own version of that is specific: the university and the hospital keep a stream of young people coming in, while the surrounding counties — Preston, Marion, Taylor, Barbour — have been exporting their children for two generations to Columbus, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Raleigh and Northern Virginia. So the standing arrangement is a phone call every Sunday and a long drive twice a year, and in between there is nothing tangible at all. A bouquet in February, on no particular date, delivered to a house on a hill in Westover or Sabraton or up the Deckers Creek valley toward Masontown, is the one gesture in that relationship that arrives physically. Two things make it work. Give a mobile or landline number so the driver can call rather than guess, and if the recipient is the kind of person who will worry about the cost of it, say on the card that it is just because, in those words — otherwise a surprise delivery to an eighty-year-old in this part of the state reads as bad news arriving.

Morgantown's everyday routes follow the terrain, and they divide into the ones a driver can walk and the ones they cannot. Close in, on the grades above the downtown grid, are South Park below Walnut — brick streets, deep porches, the historic district, where the last fifty yards is usually walked up from a corner — plus Wiles Hill, Woodburn, First Ward, Jerome Park, and Greenmont down on the low ground by Deckers Creek. North of that the land flattens and the houses get driveways: Suncrest along Van Voorhis and Stewartstown Road, then Star City on the river. Across the bridges are Westover and Granville, out toward the University Town Centre. East runs Sabraton along Earl Core Road toward Dellslow, and beyond it the Cheat Lake and Cheat Neck shoreline off I-68. Then the radius opens out: Kingwood and the Preston County ridge, Reedsville and Arthurdale, Fairmont and Grafton to the south, Waynesburg and Uniontown over the Pennsylvania line, Oakland in Garrett County, Maryland. The rule of thumb on this grid is that anything inside the city is a same-afternoon run if the order beats two o'clock, and anything beyond about half an hour out is better as a morning order the following day.

A cluster of everyday reasons in Morgantown are seasonal in ways that are peculiar to this town. Late July and August is the welcome-to-the-house window, because this city's housing market turns over on the academic calendar rather than in the spring — leases start in August, closings and moves stack up in the weeks before it, and the new-neighbour and new-tenant bouquet clusters accordingly. September brings the thank-you to a teacher: Morgantown High School, University High School and the middle schools feeding them are all inside the delivery grid, and a front-office drop with the teacher's name and the school is straightforward. January and February bring the most West Virginian gesture on this page, which is flowers for the neighbour who cleared your driveway. On a South Park grade or a Suncrest cul-de-sac, a plowed driveway in January is not a courtesy, it is the difference between going to work and not, and the person with the plough blade on their truck knows perfectly well what they did for you. And spring, when it finally arrives, brings the Saturday-morning habit of the Morgantown Farmers Market down on Spruce Street — which is worth knowing mainly because a Saturday delivery in that part of downtown wants a call-ahead, since the household you are sending to may well be out at it.