Flowers for Pontotoc, MS

Pontotoc keeps its bearings around the courthouse square, where MS-6 running toward Oxford crosses MS-15 heading up to Ecru and Sherman, and the flower orders follow those two roads out. The name is Chickasaw — it comes down as the land of hanging grapes or of the cattails, depending who you ask — and the county has always been furniture-belt country, so a lot of the everyday tickets are the kind you send to a plant office: a birthday arrangement for someone on the line, a congratulations bouquet when a supervisor makes manager. Add the school programs, the church anniversaries, and the get-well baskets that ride MS-6 east to the Tupelo hospitals, and you have the shape of a Pontotoc week. Delivery here is a matter of the county map more than the odometer; the shops know which gravel turnoffs the GPS gets wrong.

Other Mississippi cities.