A February nor'easter comes up the Lamprey valley sideways, filling the Route 125 crossroads in Epping until the lot lines vanish and the whole town goes soft-edged and blue. That is the hour this crew is already awake for — plows pushing and relocating the piles, brine and salt and sand laid ahead of the ice, shovel crews and blowers walking the sidewalks so a school door or a hospital entrance opens onto bare pavement instead of glass. The satisfaction in commercial snow and ice work is geometric: a retail center or corporate campus scraped back to its painted stripes before the first headlights turn in, snow trucked off-site so the banks never creep in and eat the corners. Every site is mapped before winter arrives and written up again after each storm, and the phones stay on around the clock across New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts. By the time the sun clears the pines above the old rail bed, the lot looks like it was never buried at all — which is exactly the idea.