https://www.facebook.com/coolgoodolddays/photos/a.584086731776739.1073741828.580909025427843/704635399721871/?type=3&theater
YEP! My cousin and I went out with a wagon one day and collected more than 200 beer bottles. LOL We got a whole penny apiece for them. Those were the days when many people still threw their bottles out the window and, driving and drinking was norm. We lived in the country, we wandered all over the countryside collecting those bottles from ditches and beside barns.
Of course the bottle collecting had to be on the days when the berries were not ready for picking. When the fields were ripe we spent all day six days a week in the fields picking blackberries, strawberries, raspberries, boysenberries, beans, blue berries and thornless blackberries toward the end of the summer. We began our work in the berry fields when we were eight years old.
We got whooped if we were found too late in the bed in the morning, when there was money to be made in the fields. I never looked upon those days as bad, they were how we learned to work and save money to buy our bicycles, school clothes and school supplies.
The child labor laws began in the seventies and have ruined the next generations, taking from them the valuable lessons of the berry fields. How to work in the hot sun of the afternoon and the cold mornings, even when we were miserable for a short time, we did it anyway. Nowadays children whine at the sight of work, practically demanding that they not have to do any or thinking they have to be paid union wages for their menial work.
We never had a dull moment in the country, we climbed trees, built forts and dams across the creek, when we were not working. We never dared say to our parents that we were bored, if we did we were given some more work to do. There was always work in the country.
We were too tired at the end of the day in the summer to even think about getting into trouble, not to mention we knew if we were naughty, not only were we in trouble with the neighbors but with our parents too. Parents backed one another up back then. Only the bad parents defended their children when they were naughty. I think it was because good parents cared more about their children's character than their feelings about getting whooped.
Those were the "good ole days" that I remember, not that they were easy or perfect, but we learned far more lessons than the children can learn now, life is just simply too easy for American children.
We didn't have many toys, we had the entire outdoors for our adventure, no need for lots of fancy toys. I don't miss those days really, for me they are over, but I miss them for the children of today who miss out on this life of adventure to keep their faces in meaningless and time wasting electronics.
Lord Come Quickly!!!!!
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