Flowers for Newport, ME

Newport is where the interstate slows down for a lake. Exit 157 dumps traffic onto US-2 at the west end of Sebasticook Lake, and the village strings itself along the water and the highway — the diners and the hardware store, the boat launch, the churches, the school. Flowers here follow that rhythm. Winter orders are birthdays and get-well runs up to Pittsfield; summer brings a steady trickle of anniversary and thank-you bouquets out to the camps that ring the shoreline, where the address might be a cottage name instead of a number. The health care for the whole area concentrates ten minutes north at Northern Light Sebasticook Valley Hospital, so a good share of what leaves a Newport cooler is riding US-2 to a hospital room.

Other Maine cities.