After a storm, a commercial lot in Dixon is a wide dark field under sodium light, and clearing it is a night's work done in long loops. Plowing pushes the piles where they will not block a door or a sightline; entries get shoveled and salted so the first shift arrives to bare pavement. The Rock River valley can hand over wet heavy snow one week and dry drifting snow the next, and the two do not travel the same way under a blade. Getting a lot open before daylight is a quiet sort of pride — nobody watches it happen, everybody sees the result. Dixon and the surrounding Lee County towns.