First light comes late to West Windsor, sliding down the shoulder of Ascutney before it ever reaches the dooryards below, and by then the machines are already warm. Kurtzhalz Excavation works the ground of the Upper Valley — house sites and commercial excavation, land clearing and stumping, road and driveway maintenance, ditching, utilities, septic installs, and ponds set into a hillside as if the water had always meant to gather there — along with grading, grubbing, erosion control, drainage solutions, utility trenching, site preparation, and the winter plowing that keeps a Vermont road open. There is a plain, lasting pleasure in a driveway that sheds water instead of hoarding it, in a pad squared true to the slope, in a bank that holds through the whole long shrug of mud season. They work across West Windsor, Windsor, Hartland, and Woodstock, and out through Vermont and New Hampshire, where the dirt roads climb and the evening light comes in long and low over the hayfields. What they leave behind is shaped earth that looks like it settled that way on its own.