When Bangs Lake goes hard and the wind comes straight across it, Wauconda knows winter has settled in for the duration. Mitch's Green Thumb Landscaping runs the snow work here: plowing drives, clearing walks and steps, shoveling out what the plow cannot reach, and salting the ice that forms behind it. The moraine country around town is all short hills and curves, so a driveway gets cleared with the grade in mind and the pile set where the melt will not run back across it. The best part of the job happens before most people are up — the drive open, the walk to the door scraped to the pavement, the salt already working. There is a particular quiet on a Lake County street at five in the morning, snow still coming down, one truck out working it.