A well-kept yard pays its people back daily — in the ease of stepping out the side door, in the way a house finally sits squarely on its lot and looks like it belongs there. Pioneer Valley Lawncare keeps that quiet ledger balanced for properties in Chicopee, Massachusetts, where the Chicopee River runs down to meet the Connecticut and the old brick mill blocks give way to street after street of front lawns. The work is lawn care: mowing, trimming and edging, and the seasonal cleanups that carry a yard from thaw to the last of the leaves. There's a plain satisfaction in a fresh cut seen from the sidewalk — the passes running true, the edge along the walk drawn clean as a pencil line, every clipping gone. Valley summers are long and green in this river bottom, and grass tended week after week holds that green all the way through them.