Memories of my youth

Sometimes when I think back I am amazed at just how much life and people have changed in just a few decades. I am not an old man but when I was a kid things were so much different than now. I recall how we used to work in logging and we used big horses to pull the logs out of the woods. We rolled the logs up long poles to load them on the truck. Finally we went high tech and bought an old winch truck to load the logs. We had a farm and I recall my father buying a new diesel tractor but not having enough money at the time to get implements for it. We pulled an old mowing machine that was supposed to be horse drawn behind the tractor to cut our hay for the first year we had the tractor. We also used an old horse drawn rake for awhile, once again pulled behind the tractor. At first one had to ride the tractor and another had to ride the rake to hit the foot pedal at the right time. My Dad finally rigged a rope from the rake to the tractor so he could trip the pedal to dump the hay. I remember when calculators came out. They were LED and bigger than calculators now, but not a lot bigger. They seemed pretty neat to us, but another thing that has changed is that our teachers in school wouldn't permit us to use calculators in class. That was considered cheating. We were expected to be able to do our math problems without outside help. I think that is one of the problems we have in our society now. There is always help. Knowledge right at our fingertips on any subject you can think of. We never have to figure for ourselves, or invent, or use common sense. Everything is pretty much done for us, and there are so many laws and regulations now that our freedom is nearly gone. Another memory I have is when I was a young man, my brother and I would go out to my shop and sometimes work nearly the entire day or night, usually trying to build something because we had more pride in something we made ourselves than something store bought. I miss those days. I love our modern technology but its not worth the loss of our independence and common sense.