October on Otsego Lake turns the water pewter, and the maples above Waters go a color you can pick out from the ridge road. That is the month Stuckman Landscaping does its closest listening — mows getting shorter, leaves coming down in the yards along the south end, everything set in order before the ground goes hard. There is real satisfaction in a property closed out right: beds cleared, turf cut low, nothing left for the first storm to bury. By December the same drives and walks get opened with the plow and finished by hand, often in the dark, often twice in a night. Come April the lawns surface again, greening as though someone had been keeping watch over them. Someone had.