Uptown Lawn and Snow

About Uptown Lawn and Snow

Aetna is open prairie country in southwestern Minnesota, laid out in square-mile sections where gravel roads meet at right angles and the horizon never moves. Uptown Lawn and Snow may carry a city word in its name, but the winter work here is pure countryside: wind combing snow off the fields and piling it wherever a windbreak or a building gives it a place to stop. They clear it away from driveways and the long lanes out to the gravel, so a homestead ringed in white can still reach everything beyond it. On the clearest January mornings the sky goes enormous and pale, and a freshly plowed lane looks like a pencil line ruled straight across it. That is the quiet reward of snow work in Aetna: one clean path through a great deal of open land.