April in Severance is meltwater — the last gray banks going down, the fields shining, the whole flat country running toward its ditches at once. That week is our hinge: the plow comes off and the mowers come out, and we spend the next several months mowing, trimming and edging yards across town while the plains green up to the horizon. Then the year swings the other way and we are back on driveways and walks, plowing and shoveling ahead of the morning. Two very different jobs, one habit behind them — arrive when we said, work the whole property, leave the borders clean. A place tended straight through the calendar never has to be rescued, only kept.