Farm security advances with technology

Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. I might have been lying on the living-room floor, reading and listening to “The Shadow’’ on the radio. My mom worried a lot. She would have wanted to lock up. I just don’t remember that we did.

We did not lock the place when we went away. We returned from a holiday trip once to find my mom’s favorite parakeet on the floor and one of the cats prowling the house. The cat was supposed to be outside. The bird was supposed to be in its cage. A neighbor popped by with some gifts, letting the cat slip in, too. The neighbor apparently opened the cage and didn’t get it latched. My mom missed that bird’s happy chirping.

As someone who has lived in town most of his adult life, I would no more go to bed without checking the locks than I would leave my cash and credit cards on the front step with a “Free, Take Some’’ sign. I don’t expect to be robbed in the night, but I want to make it as difficult as possible, just in case.

From the time Nancy and I got married, and that’s almost 55 years now, I have made sure the house was locked. It was kind of a Ronald Reagan “Trust but verify’’ policy many years before Reagan left the movies for the White House. My dad might have described the approach as “don’t expect trouble, but don’t be a fool, either.’’

I have no recollection of us locking doors on the farm, ever. I don’t know that our neighbors did, either. Now that the topic is in my mind, I will try to track down some old people from my generation and see what they remember. I should talk to a few of them, anyway.

Maybe farm folks in the 1950s had a higher level of trust. Maybe their judgment of the honesty and integrity of their fellow humans was higher than mine sometimes is today.

As I look…