Amherst keeps its stone walls where they were laid — low granite seams running off the dooryards, past white clapboard and the long green curve of the village common, out to where the road narrows into pine. Knott's Land Care, LLC works those lots and the ground between them: mowing lawns and open fields, cutting a clean edge along a walkway, laying mulch, setting sod and hydroseed where bare dirt needs coaxing into green, installing and tending turf irrigation, pruning and planting shrubs and trees, running landscape lighting toward a doorway, building walkways and patios stone by stone. When the valley turns, the same ground asks something else — brine mixed and spread ahead of the weather, salt where ice means to take hold, plows out on the Souhegan roads, ice patrol through the small hours until a driveway lies open and dark and quiet again. Come thaw, the maples drip along the shoulder and the first cut stripe appears, and a yard holds its season the way those walls hold the hillside.