Cutting Time

About Cutting Time

Late afternoon in Brooklyn lays a long gold light across the hayfields and stone walls off Route 169, and the last pass of the mower leaves a lawn striped clean to the wall's edge. Cutting Time works the lawn-and-snow side of the Quiet Corner: grass kept even through the humid green weeks of July, driveways opened in the black hours before a January workday begins. There is a plain satisfaction in an edge that holds its line along a gravel drive, and in the scrape of a plow finding pavement while the maples near the town green are still loaded white. Around Brooklyn and the nearby Windham County towns, the work is measured in yards that look looked-after from the road, in every month of the year.