East of the highway the land gives itself over to marsh — cattail and phragmites, herons standing in the shallows near Sterling State Park, wind that never quite stops coming off the water. Hinkley's Outdoor Services keeps a Frenchtown Township calendar shaped by that openness: mowing, trimming and edging while the grass is running, plowing and clearing when it isn't. Out here weather arrives with no warning from the treeline, and the difference between an easy morning and a hard one is having the gear ready before it shows. There is real pleasure in the last pass of a mow, and the same feeling in the last pass of a plow — the moment a property snaps back to a clean shape. Same ground, same attention, twelve months of it.