North by Northwest

About North by Northwest

Northwest of the city the ground stops pretending to be flat. The Balcones ridges rise up in cedar and caliche, driveways tilt, and nearly every lawn out past Anderson Mill is a lawn on a slope. North by Northwest works that terrain the way it insists on being worked — mowing across the grade, trimming the rock edges no mower can reach, keeping beds and hedges in shape where the soil is more stone than dirt. Winter here is dry and bright, the light thin and clean coming off the hills, and a kept yard stands out against all that gray-green juniper. Hard ground, tidy result.