Surv Providence

About Surv Providence

Down where the triple-deckers stand shoulder to shoulder and the granite curbs run straight to the corner, the dooryards of Providence are small and hard-worked — a strip of grass, a stone wall somebody's grandfather set, a driveway pitched toward the street. Surv Providence works those yards and doorways: yard work and exterior cleaning, junk removal and donation hauls, local moving and furniture moving, packing and unpacking, painting, odd jobs, and snow removal when the wind comes up off Narragansett Bay. There is a plain pleasure in the results — a walk scraped down to bare pavement before the city wakes, a cellar emptied and the truck loaded square, a house handed back to itself with the clutter gone. The hills here are steep and the side streets narrow, and a crew learns them the way you learn a song. By the time the light goes long over the Woonasquatucket, the block looks tended, and it holds.