The first cut of the year up on Onondaga Hill always smells like relief. Everything has been brown and sodden for months, and then one week in April the grass stands up green and the mowers come out of the shed. Barton's lawn care spends the whole long middle of the year on that green — mowing, trimming around posts and beds, running a clean edge along the drive — and then closes it out with the fall cleanup once the last leaf comes down. Syracuse summers are humid and generous, and a lawn will grow faster than anyone expects, so the schedule matters as much as the machine. Kept up week by week, an ordinary yard turns into the best-looking thing on the block by July.