The first real snow of a Joliet December usually comes overnight and lands soft, and for one hour at dawn the whole town looks brand new and completely impassable. Tepa Outdoor Services is already out in it — plowing driveways, opening walkways down to the pavement, salting the steps and aprons where the melt will refreeze by dusk. Snow keeps coming through January and February with less romance and more wind, drifting across the open ground at the edges of town. The work does not change: clear it, widen it, stack it out of the way, move to the next one. A driveway open by the time the coffee is made is a small kindness people remember all winter.