US-12 carries weather straight across the Irish Hills, and in Cement City a storm is usually heard before it is seen. Blades Lawn Care & Services works both halves of that year: the plow that opens a driveway while the village is still dark, and the mower that keeps the same yard tidy once the road dries. Snow drifts thin over the high moraine ground and piles deep in the hollows, so no two lanes clear the same way. There is a plain satisfaction in gravel showing again before the first car of the morning turns in. By June it is trimming and edging on those same lots, the line along the walk cut clean enough to read from the road.