Buffalo Mountain holds the sunrise back a few extra minutes over Hardwick, and on storm mornings AH Property Services is already working in that borrowed dark, opening driveways above the Lamoille while the town is still asleep. Winter comes at these hills sideways, filling a cleared lane twice before noon, so the work is patient — push, widen, return. Come May the same ground softens and the job turns green: mowing, trimming, edging the lines that make a yard read well from the road. There is a plain kind of pride in a clean cut around the old stone step of a Hardwick farmhouse. Two seasons, one set of steady hands, the same short list of roads.