Morton keeps one foot up on the ridge and one down in the pumpkin fields, and by October the whole town carries the smell of harvest coming in off the highway. Clean Cut, doing business as CCP Tree Services, works the maples and pin oaks along those wide Tazewell County streets — tree trimming to lift a crown off a roofline, pruning to steer a young tree before bad habits set, tree removal when a trunk has hollowed past saving. Weather here likes to come up from the southwest across open ground and reach the ridge all at once, so storm damage cleanup is a regular square on the calendar: limbs off the drive, the yard picked clean, brush gone before supper. What the crew is after is the clean line — a cut made at the collar, a tidy silhouette against a low autumn sky. Come the first hard freeze the bare branches show every decision that was made, and that is the honest test.