Malpass Landscaping and Snow Management

About Malpass Landscaping and Snow Management

The work keeps its own meter — blades turning through morning grass, a plow's steel finding the seam of a lot before the first car of the day, hands squaring an edge until the line runs true. Malpass Landscaping and Snow Management tends the outside of commercial properties around Auburn, Massachusetts, where the land tilts up Pakachoag Hill, oak woods press close against office drives and parking aprons, and the highways braid together in the valley below. In the growing months that means landscape design and installation, mowing and the patient grooming of grounds; in winter it means snow and ice taken off the pavement while the Worcester County sky is still slate-blue and unlit. What's left behind is plain and physical — curb lines visible again, a lot swept clean to its corners, a property that plainly looks after itself because someone was there at four in the morning. That mark stays on a place for the whole of its season.