Rick's Cleanouts

About Rick's Cleanouts

Behind Garfield's houses run the narrow ways — a drive one car wide, a garage set back at the far end, a gate, a strip of concrete a truck can barely reach. Rick's Cleanouts handles that tight winter ground: shoveling what no blade can get at, cutting a path to the street, and breaking the frozen ridge the town plow leaves across the apron. February is the long month, when the piles have gone gray and hard and every fresh inch lands on top of the last. Getting a car out by seven is the entire measure of a night well spent. In a town of small lots, somebody has to do the corners by hand.