Stone Cross

About Stone Cross

Morning arrives in West Des Moines along the brick of Fifth Street, where the old rail grade runs quiet through Valley Junction and the light reaches the storefront awnings well before it ever reaches the lawns. Stone Cross keeps that hour — mowers rolling off the trailer while the grass is still cool and the yards sloping toward Walnut Creek are still holding their dew. There is a plain pleasure in an edge cut clean along a sidewalk, in the line it draws between the walk and the turf, in the neat trimmed ring of green left around the roots of a bur oak. Cleanups carry off the clippings and the litter a season leaves behind, so the ground underneath can breathe again. By the time the block is properly awake the work has moved a street over, and what it leaves is the kind of green a neighbor notices without quite knowing why.