There is a particular satisfaction in the hour a fresh drive cools to black and the striping goes down straight — an edge you can run a boot along, a surface that sheds the rain and gives back nothing but a clean line. D & F Excavating & Paving works that satisfaction across Addison County: construction site excavation, complete asphalt paving, seal coating and driveway sealing, crack filling, line striping, gravel hauling and crushed stone, and snow removal when the valley turns white. Middlebury is a good place for it — Otter Creek dropping over the falls right in the middle of town, marble underfoot, the Green Mountains standing up to the east while the Champlain lowlands open west into farm light. The work here is stone hauled up clay hillsides in mud season and a surface laid in August that will hold through the freeze. What it leaves behind is plain and lasting: a site cut true, a drive opened before the first coffee, a black ribbon curving off a Vermont road as though the land had always meant to go that way.