On a Saturday morning the square in downtown Jasper fills slowly — the courthouse block, the storefronts, folks walking over from the side streets with coffee. Merrells Mowing & More spends those mornings a few blocks out, running mowers across the yards of the neighborhoods that ring the old center of town. Jasper lots are compact and full of character, hemmed with fences, mailboxes, hydrangeas and steep little banks that a mower has to be coaxed across. The reward is the walk-back look: rows lying the same direction, the edge along the sidewalk cut to a fine dark line, not a blade of grass left on the pavement. Ordinary Saturdays, made a little better one lawn at a time.