North of the city the ground starts climbing toward the first ridge, up where Washington Rock looks back across the whole plain with Plainfield laid out below like something drawn to scale. Highland landscaping takes the grades and the flats alike: mowing and trimming the slope-side lots where a lawn drains fast, plowing and salting those same inclines once ice makes them serious. A pitched driveway in February is a different animal than a level one, and it wants salt, timing and a careful blade. In summer the payoff is a hillside yard cut clean from top to bottom with no scalped ridge running through the middle. In winter it is a car reaching the garage without a slip.