West of Wheeling the Des Plaines River runs slow and brown through floodplain woods, and on an April morning the fog off it burns away by nine. That is when Pacocha Landscaping Services, Inc. gets the mowers going, laying the first true stripes of the year across yards that spent months under gray. The work is easy to name and hard to do right: an even cut, an edge crisp enough to run a finger along, a walk blown clean before the truck pulls away. When January turns the same ground hard, the plows and the salt come back out, and the driveway is open before anyone has poured coffee. Flat prairie land takes weather head-on out here, and the answer to that is simply showing up, twelve months of it.