It’s ten p.m. on a cold Tuesday night in the winter. Most peoples’ evenings are ending, and they are heading off to sleep in their warm, comfortable beds. However, for Morgan Mathews, his night is just beginning.

Mathews, the owner of his own landscaping business, Morgan’s Landscaping, browses the Weather Channel on his phone. He sees a predicted snow accumulation of just two inches, but that’s enough to go out.

“We basically do anything from two inches and up, but if it’s going to be really cold, or it’s going to turn to freezing and stay freezing for a long period of time, we’ll go out for an inch and a half,” Mathews said.

Whether it be mowing lawns and putting in patios in the summer, or plowing and shoveling snow in the winter, Mathews prefers to work with a small crew of employees. In the winter, he works with basically the same people as he does in the summer, but he also outsources some houses to other workers, one of who is Connor Paull ’20.

“Morgan tells me to go out every time it snows. I’d say on average it takes me about ten to 15 minutes per house, and I usually do about 15 houses per night,” Paull said.

Paull usually worked with his friend Stuart Standish ’20, who shovels while Paull clears the driveway with a snowblower.

“The last time I went out to clear snow with Connor was the night before we had the snow day. The snow accumulation was about five inches and it took us close to three hours to clear four or five houses,” Standish said.

Mathews and his crew usually don’t begin working until just before the last snowfall, and oftentimes they will clear houses multiple times per night, depending on how much falls. Sometimes, it takes them hours to clear just a few houses.

“We had somewhere around 26 inches of snow one time, so it basically snowed for close to 20 hours, so we did each of the 60 houses three or four times, and I was out personally for 26 hours straight,” Mathews said.

Although his crew may get tired, Mathews seems to never slow down when he’s on the job. On nights with heavy snowfall, he lets his crew take breaks, but he personally keeps on working.

“For some reason it doesn’t bother me. Some of the other guys will get tired and say ‘we need to stop and eat’, but for me I can just keep going. It doesn’t bother me,” Mathews said. “One year when it was that bad I told everyone they could go home and sleep for six or seven hours then come back and finish up, and I basically just stayed out the whole time.”