Landcrafters

About Landcrafters

At five on a January morning, Middletown's unusually wide Main Street is a corridor of lamplight with the snow still coming down sideways through it. Landcrafters works that hour — the clearing that happens while the house is still dark, so a car backs out at seven without a shovel ever leaving the garage. Come green season the same properties want steady mowing, the river valley warming until the grass on the terraces above the Connecticut jumps ahead of everyone's weekend. Snow and grass turn out to be one discipline seen twice: arrive on the right day, leave the ground looking tended. Middletown and its neighbors get both halves of that year.