Window cleaning in Flower Mound.

Flower Mound runs between Grapevine Lake on the south and Lewisville Lake on the north and east, and at around eighty thousand people it's the largest town we cover regularly. What matters for glass is that much of it is settled: established neighborhoods, grown-in landscaping, and trees that were planted long enough ago to now be over the roof.

Mature trees mean the same organic load as the wooded towns to the west — pollen through spring, sap and leaf fall through the year, and film on the shaded elevations. The difference here is that the houses are closer together and the canopy often sits directly over the roofline, so debris goes straight into the gutters and the upper tracks.

The lakes add the other half. Open water on two sides means wind with something in it, and the homes on the lake-facing streets take a steady load of fine dust and mineral haze on the elevations that look out over the water — which, inconveniently, are usually the windows the house was designed around.

There's also a quieter issue in the older parts of town. Neighborhoods built through the eighties and nineties are now carrying double-pane units well past the age their seals were built for, and a failed seal shows up as a permanent fog between the panes that no cleaning touches. If that's what you're looking at, it's a glass job rather than a cleaning one.