Wallingford sits on trap rock, and you can read it right through the town: stone walls threading the back lots, ledge shouldering up through a lawn where the topsoil ran thin, old field boundaries still holding after two centuries of weather. Lawn care here means working with all of it — mowing to the wall and no farther, cutting the grass that crowds a stone step, edging beds so the border reads as deliberately as the masonry does. The season runs on a weekly cut, mulch refreshed when the beds fade out, and cleanups in spring and fall when a yard needs resetting. There is plain pleasure in the after-picture: turf even, edges defined, every stone standing out the way somebody long ago meant it to. Wallingford yards pay back that kind of patience.