Master Paving

About Master Paving

Late autumn in Ashland is a hinge: the maples along the Sudbury River let go, the reservoir turns pewter, and the same crews who spent the warm months laying asphalt trade the screed for the plow blade. Master Paving works both halves of that year — residential driveways and walkways, new commercial parking lots and repairs to the ones frost has chewed at — and then, when the first storms come down over the hills, commercial snow plowing and removal across Middlesex, Worcester, Norfolk and Suffolk counties. There is a plain, physical pleasure in a drive rolled smooth and dark to a crisp edge, still warm, holding the shape of a house's approach; there is the same pleasure at four in the morning in a lot pushed back to bare pavement before the first car turns in. From Main Street in Ashland's old mill village, that is the whole of it — making the ground people cross every day something they never have to think about.