A February storm comes up the Connecticut valley after dark, and by midnight the road out past Maromas is one unbroken white surface with the river running black beside it. Maxwell Property Maintenance LLC works those hours — truck lights swinging across a driveway while the rest of the street sleeps. The measure of the night is the moment somebody opens a door at six and finds pavement instead of a foot of snow, the path cut clean all the way to the step. Across the water the old brownstone ledges of Portland take the very same weather; on this bank Middletown's hills make every drive its own small problem to solve. Clearing them is the entire job, and it is worth doing right.