A clipper drops out of the northwest and by two in the morning it is filling in every drive between Howell and the open farm country toward Cohoctah, snow running low and sideways across ground that has nothing on it to slow the wind. That is the hour S & S Concrete & Snow Removal is working: lots, driveways, walkways — pushed back, stacked clean, salted where ice would otherwise set up hard before sunrise. Livingston County wakes early, and there is a particular satisfaction in a parking lot plowed all the way to its corners rather than merely opened down the middle. The trucks go back out for the second wave, and the third, because a storm here rarely finishes on schedule. Snow removal for Howell and the surrounding townships, storm by storm; no one thanks a plow at four in the morning, and that is rather the point.