Between Buffalo and Rochester the land goes flat, and Batavia sits in the middle of it with weather you can watch approaching for twenty minutes before it arrives. Veterans pride tree and lawn mows, trims and edges yards across the city blocks and out along the roads that follow Tonawanda Creek. Midsummer will push the grass hard one week and stall it the next, so the route bends to what the lawn is actually doing rather than to the calendar. Clippings get blown off the walks, the trimmer traces the fence line and the foundation, and the yard is left looking finished instead of merely shortened. On a July evening, with the light stretching long down Main Street, a block of tended lawns simply reads as a place people care about.