Morning comes off the Connecticut River in a low silver haze, and by the time it burns clear over East Hartford's flat meadow ground, the mowers are already drawing their lines. White Oak Landscaping & Lawncare works that valley floor and the rise toward Manchester — keeping lawns cut and tended, cleaning out beds, planting and weeding, setting young trees and shrubs where they'll have room to become old ones. Where water wants to sit, as it does on this old floodplain after a hard April rain, they put in drainage to move it along. They build the hard bones of a place too: walkways, driveways, patios, retaining walls stacked to hold a slope steady for years. There is a particular satisfaction in the last pass of an afternoon — the edge crisp against the sidewalk, the mulch dark, the stone sitting level and true, the whole property looking like someone paid attention to it.