Spring arrives in Lamotte all at once — a warm rain, three days, and ground that was gray last week is suddenly, impossibly green. C&C Lawncare starts its season there, with the first mow that takes a winter's worth of shag off a yard and hands it back looking like itself. From then on it runs weekly through the long humid stretch of an eastern-Illinois summer: cutting, trimming around porch posts and the pad by the house, edging the walks clean. They like a yard that looks like somebody is watching over it, the kind that makes a person slow down a little going past. In fall they haul the leaves off and put the lawn down for the winter.