There's a week in March when the prairie around Paris quits being brown. Red-winged blackbirds take the fence wire, the ditches run full, and the first green shows in the grass like it had been waiting down there the whole winter. Grass Roots opens its season right about then — a first cut, the edges brought back, winter's litter raked out of the corners — and keeps the mowing steady from that week clear through to the last cleanup. It's plain work and it goes deep: grass held to a line, week after week, until the yard reads as somebody's. Mowing, trimming and cleanups in Paris, Illinois and the small towns near it.