Montcalm County keeps its horizons low and its fields wide, so the weather crossing Howard City can be read a long way off. Affordable Yard Maintenance llc works both halves of that year — mowing, trimming and edging through the long green light of summer, plowing and ice treatment when the drifts pile against driveways off US-131. There is a particular satisfaction in a lawn cut in even, straight bands across the sandy ground that used to grow potatoes. And another in a driveway opened at four in the morning, black and clear, before the first car needs it. Yard and snow work for Howard City and the townships around it, in whatever the sky happens to be offering.