Gardeners

About Gardeners

At six in the evening the light comes down First Street sideways, gold across the stucco, and every blade of grass is handed its own long shadow. Gardeners works East Los Angeles yards toward that hour — mowing, edging, hedge and shrub trimming, bed weeding, sprinkler adjustment, seasonal cleanup and hauling. The name is plain on purpose: this is the tending itself, week after week, no more and no less. Roses along a block wall, a strip of lawn behind the wrought iron, a driveway swept out to the sidewalk line. Ordinary work carried all the way to the end, which is how a street ends up looking loved.