Kings Highway runs east out of Fairfield toward the marsh edge of Ash Creek, and The Becker Companies, LLC works the properties on either side of it — opening the ground up, then putting it back better than it lay. Summer is a hole in a backyard becoming a pool, a patio and walkway going down stone by stone, a tree that outgrew its spot taken out clean, excavation squared away before anything gets built on top of it. Cooler weeks turn to pruning and mulching, fertilizing and weed control, and the patient fall work of leaf removal until the beds sit bare and ready for the frost that comes in off the Sound. Then February, and the dark hour before a commercial lot fills: plowing, de-icing, pavement wet and passable while the streetlights are still on. Landscape lighting keeps the short evenings in between worth stepping outside for. From Fairfield through Westport, Bridgeport and Stratford, it is one crew's habit of doing the ground both ways — breaking it and healing it.