A Putnam County January is a short, sharp thing — frost silvering a dormant lawn at daybreak, gone by ten o'clock, the bermuda sleeping tan and flat until spring finds it. Lee's Repair Service works right through that quiet stretch around Eatonton and out into the county, cutting back, cleaning up and hauling off what the fall left behind, so a yard has nothing standing in its way when green-up arrives. Then the season turns and the mowing starts in earnest — cutting, trimming, edging, walks blown clean. This part of Georgia asks for both halves of the year, the tidy dormant months and the fast, headlong growing ones. A yard remembers what was done for it in the cold.