Evening comes on slow over the hills east of Howell, where the glacier left oak and hickory standing on the ridges and dropped Lake Chemung into the low ground between them. Shockley's Tree Services works those lots — the wooded subdivisions off Oak Grove Road, the older farm places, the yards backing onto the nature center's woods. October is a good month to look up: with half the leaves gone you can finally see the dead limb hanging over the driveway, and that one goes first. Removals are rigged and lowered rather than dropped when a house sits close, and pruning takes the crossing branches and deadwood so a tree carries a lighter load into January. Storm work fills the rest of the calendar — limbs off the roof, the fence freed, the whole heap chipped and gone before the week is out.