Those Were the Days--Were They?

An old man gets nostalgic reading this Life on a Colorado Farm post about haying, then and now.  But the voice of reality insists:

• I wasn't putting up beautiful alfalfa hay, but less pretty timothy/meadow grass/weeds hay, sometimes having gone through a rain or two which severely diminished its value
• it wasn't early June but likely early July, since we had to wait for the neighbor who did the baling to get his hay done first--a penalty for being a small farmer
• I didn't work on a crew of four, except for a few occasions when I hired out, but usually just with dad, perhaps my sister, and sometimes one neighbor helper
• it wasn't a beautiful blue sky on top of a Colorado mesa but a likely cloudy sky in a New York valley
• and the cut ends of the hay scratched the hell out of my forearms.

Nice how modern machinery enables an older couple (still younger than me) to continue farming but being realistic I suspect there's few to no young neighbor boys around to help--machinery means the population is thinning out in rural areas and getting old.