At three in the morning in Leslie the streetlights fall on a town gone entirely white and entirely still. That is the hour this work belongs to — a truck out on the township roads, headlights swinging into one drive after another, pushing the night's accumulation back to the lawn edge and opening a path from the door to the car. By the time kitchen windows start to glow, the hard part is already behind the day. Snow clearing is the whole of it here, and there is pride in a drive scraped clean enough that the pavement shows dark. Winter in south-central Michigan is long; nobody should have to begin it with a shovel.