6 May—Briefly, it’s no surprise that yesterday’s referendum on the Region 20 budget passed with flying colors, 1,033 to 433, with only Morris defeating it by 19 votes. How many of the people who voted would have attended a meeting? Probably a lot fewer than a third.

Corollary to yesterday’s piece inspired by the Kentucky Derby, then, the Home Hint of the Day on yesterday’s Old Farmer’s Almanac website was: “Don’t put a pile of decomposed manure directly on the garden unless you can spread it right away. An unspread pile of manure can create excessive nitrogen and acidity in the area where it sits.”

That brought to mind a tale of manure from seven decades ago. It wasn’t long after we’d moved to a house in Forest Hills with lawns in front and back. And on one side. (a Driveway on the other side.) The lawns weren’t much by rural standards. My Hustler zero-turn mower could do the whole schmear in a minute with just a few passes. But Mr. Hustler hadn’t invented zero-turns back then. So all we—father, brother, I, and mother—had to mow with was the latest self-sharpening yellow, person-powered Clemson reel mower that had cost 12 dollars, which I adjusted not to self-sharpen, to make pushing it easier.

Before I had our own lawn to mow, I’d be grateful when a few nice neighbors would let me mow their little lawns. And they didn’t even charge me for the pleasure and privilege. But our lawn turned mowing into an onerous chore that I couldn’t get out of, along with trimming, edging, and weeding.

But all that’s irrelevant.

As I walked home from school one sunny spring day about a year after we’d moved to Forest Hills, approaching our little patch of green I encountered a strange but not unpleasant aroma. When I got to the house, I noticed that there were lumps of brown stuff with straw coming out of it all over the front lawn. And my mother was on the front steps admiring it.

It seems that not long before I got home, my mother had got a great buy—only 25 dollars, as I recall—on half a truckload of fresh horse manure from Aqueduct Racetrack, just a few miles away. She was thrilled to get it from the men in the truck who claimed they had got lost looking for another address, since the lawn needed to be fertilized anyway and the fresh manure, spread on the lawn by the truckers, would save us the trouble of doing it ourselves. Made sense.

I couldn’t recall ever having smelled or seen horse manure, by the way—even at summer concentration camp. Nor did I, my mother, my father, or my brother know that you just don’t put fresh manure of any species on lawns or anything else.

We only learned that a few days later when the landscaper—they were called gardeners back then, at least in New York—who did the dirty for several of the neighbors broke the news to my father and offered to dispose of the manure for free and repair the lawn for not much more than my mother had paid for the manure. An offer my father couldn’t refuse.

And not only that. So now the happy—absolutely ecstatic—ending: My father was disgusted by the manure incident and wasn’t all that thrilled with mowing or gardening anyway, so he hired the gardener. And I was off the hook! And my father gave the yellow Clemson mower to the gardener, who probably never used it because he had a couple of powered rotary mowers, one by a gasoline engine, one by a long cord running to an electric outlet . . .