Down in Union County the year opens with orchards — the hillsides around Cobden going white and pink before anything else has quite decided to wake up. Duck Works Lawn Care LLC starts its mowing in that same stretch of the calendar, when the grass in the hollows comes on thick and the mornings still carry fog off the bottoms out west toward the refuge. The work stays steady through the long southern Illinois summer: cutting on schedule, trimming along fence posts and porch steps, keeping the line honest where lawn meets gravel. Autumn brings the clearing, leaves off the turf before the rains flatten them into it. A tended yard in this hill country looks like a clearing somebody meant to make.