Spencer calls itself the gateway to the Iowa Great Lakes, and the trees along the lake roads heading northwest toward Milford carry a different kind of winter than the ones in town — cottage lots half-shut for the season, their driveways drifting undisturbed for days between visits. H&L Tree Service, LLC clears those lake-area driveways alongside its regular tree work in Spencer proper, the two jobs sharing the same read on which trees are holding too much wet snow to be trusted overhead. A cabin driveway that only sees a car every week or two in January still needs opening before ice locks a season's worth of snow into one solid sheet at the bottom. Getting a lake-road lane scraped back to gravel, with the leafless shoreline trees standing bare against a frozen lake beyond it, is the winter half of work that spends its summers up in the same branches. It's a route that runs between two kinds of stillness — a slow winter town and a slower lake, both holding the same snow.