Nearly every street in Island Heights tips toward the river, and by October the walk down to the water is a slow slide of leaves and pine needles. Christians lawn and property maintenance works those sloping yards — mowing across the grade, trimming the banks a mower cannot hold, edging where lawn meets sidewalk. The fall cleanup is the season's real labor, pulling leaves off the turf and out of the beds before the rain mats everything flat. Through the growing months it is the weekly cut, the tidy line, and nothing left behind on the walkway. Small properties, kept in order, on a hill that shows every bit of the effort.