Thirty years ago, almost every house along this road was hooked up to a family cow. In summer you would see her in the pasture or staked out in a field; in winter her presence would be known by the conical pile of manure against the barn, its apex under the window of the tie-up. Most homeowners planted a garden, raised fruits and vegetables and berries, and put their harvest in jars against the long winter. Almost everyone had a few hens picking up the assorted proteins of yard and orchard. If you walked into a man's barn, you found a team of work horses shifting their weight from one foot to another. This pleasing rural picture has been retouched until it is hardly recognizable. The family cow has gone the way of the ivory-billed woodpecker. Householders no longer plant gardens if they can avoid it; instead, they work hard, earn money, and buy a TV set and a freezer. Then, acting on advice from the TV screen, they harvest the long, bright, weedless rows at the chain store, bringing home a carton of tomatoes with eye appeal and a package of instant potatoes. The family flock of hens has also disappeared. I still have a flock secreted in my barn, but it is not considered the thing any more if you are to enjoy a high standard of living. Hens, if kept at all, must be kept in multiples of a thousand. The largest building that has been erected in this vicinity in recent years is an egg factory--a handsome four-story ovulation arena housing about eight thousand birds. An elevator lifts bought grain to a high bin, from which an endless chain carries it around the pens in troughs. The owner, one helper, and the Bangor Hydro-Electric Company can take care of the whole operation. The pens do not contain roosts and dropping boards, which are now old hat. The modern hen just sleeps around.

RECOGNIZE PLACEMENT OF TIME WORDS AND WORD GROUPS.  One of the most frequently used additions to the basic sentence elements is the time indicator. There is, of course, time expressed in the verb phrase (present, past, future): but frequently we want to make the time more specific or we need to indicate sequence. Therefore we have recourse  to words like yesterday, tomorrow, next,  then or to word groups like in the morning and when it rains.  We can place them at various points in the sentence, depending on the amount of emphasis we want to give to the time elements and the part of the sentence we want to relate it to.
RECOGNIZE PLACEMENT OF OTHER QUALIFYING WORD GROUPS.  Our freedom  to emphasize would be severely limited it time qualifiers were the only elements that could be moved in a sentence.  Fortunately, a host of others can be moved to create special emphasis depending on what you as the writer want. For example, words ending in lie, word groups beginning with to and where can serve you well in your writing.  Now concentrate on the movable word groups beginning with words like if, because, although, unless, since, for, as if. These words introduce constructions that tell us something about a condition, a cause, or a manner. Like the time construction, these can occupy various positions in the sentence, and provide you with a greater variety of choices when deciding what you want to emphasize.

ASSIGNMENT.  Select an event or practice that was common in the near past, and write a paragraph in which you contrast the past event with a similar event of the present. Decide whether you want to emphasize the passing of time, the superiority of the present, or the rapidity of change. Underline every time qualifier you use in the paragraph.