A driveway on a Powow Hill side street, plowed clean to the pavement before the first commuter turns a key — that's the shape of a good winter morning for Alta Land and Snow Services. They run snow removal and ice management when accumulation passes a couple of inches, then spend the green months on weekly landscape maintenance, landscape design, and landscape construction across Amesbury and the mill-brick river towns around it. There's real pleasure in the summer version of the work too: a lawn striped even, beds shaped to the curve of a yard, and pools designed and built in concrete, fiberglass, or vinyl liner to hold the long light that comes up the Merrimack from the coast. Homeowners, businesses, and municipalities all get the same steady rhythm — cut, edge, build, clear — from Amesbury and Newburyport out through Haverhill, Andover, Lowell, and over the line into southern New Hampshire. The reward is simple and physical: a property that looks cared for in July and passable at five in the morning in February.