Water has always run through this town on purpose — canals and ditches threading under Laporte Avenue and out toward the fields, carrying the Poudre where the map wants it. Advanced Landscaping & Sprinklers, Inc keeps yards along those lines mowed, trimmed and cleared as the year turns, then shifts to snow when the ditch banks go stiff and pale. A Fort Collins winter can hand you eight inches overnight and take it back with a warm wind by Thursday; the work is to move it anyway, walk and drive both. Come April the grass answers fast here, and a first cut of the season smells like the whole year ahead. It is ordinary work, done where the water and the wind set the calendar.