Four in the morning in Longmont is a blue-black hour, and Left Hand Creek runs under its ice without making a sound. That is when the trucks of Lara's Lawn & Landscaping Services are already out, headlights swinging across driveways nobody has walked on yet. Plowing here is a matter of getting ahead of the day: the early shift, the school bus, the dog walker at six. Every walk gets taken down to the concrete and treated at the step, because a clean edge is what people feel underfoot long after they have stopped thinking about the storm. By the time the sun finally finds the Front Range, the whole block looks like winter was gentle with it.