Year Round Rowley

About Year Round Rowley

The alarm goes early in Dubuque in January, and earlier still when snow has been coming down on Grandview Avenue since midnight. Year Round Rowley is out in that hour, clearing drives and walks along the ridge streets and down through the brick blocks of the Cathedral district, so the first car of the morning backs onto pavement instead of a drift. By April those same routes turn green, and the work becomes mowing and trimming and hauling off the winter's grit and broken branch from yards that tilt steep toward Catfish Creek. Summers in the river valley are humid and generous; the grass grows like it means it, and keeping pace with it week after week has a rhythm of its own. The name says it plainly enough — the lawn in leaf, the walk in ice, the whole turning year on one hillside.