A cart of flowers lifts spirits and brings color back to Western NC’s dire landscape

Leslee Serdar came to work at the Whole Foods Market on Tuesday and saw one more thing going bad in a place where too much already was rotten, and decided to turn it into something good.

Downtown, dozens of people were standing in line with 5-gallon buckets and YETI cups to gather drinking water from a tanker truck because their spigots are dry, because the remnants of Hurricane Helene wrecked the city’s water system.

Across Asheville, residents have been told not to flush their toilets.

Electricity was slowly being restored, but many were expecting to spend another night — or more — in the dark.

“We had these flowers, and they were just going to wilt,” Serdar said, reaching into a grocery buggy full of bundled daisies and roses that had sat in the store for a few days while everything was closed.

“And I thought, here’s something we can do to try to keep people’s spirits up.”

Serdar loaded the flowers into the buggy and pushed it toward the front of the Merrimon Avenue store, where she offered them free to people coming in for bottled water and organic hummus.

“Some of them cry,” said Emmaleigh Argonauta, who took a turn with the flower cart Tuesday afternoon.

Nerves are frayed in this corner of the state as residents confront the scope of the damage from Helene and begin to guess at how long recovery is going to take. Power restoration is a top priority, along with running water. Without those, most schools will remain closed and many businesses can’t operate.

Meanwhile, in communities across Western North Carolina nearly broken by flood damage, people are making do with what they have and sharing if there’s enough: sandwiches here, Mexican dinners there, a bouquet of slightly past-their-prime blooms.

“It just brings a little color,” Argonauta said.

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