Goodbye, old friend

 About 1/2 mile away from our little lakeside "camp" on the side of the road, stood this  old phone booth.  Year after year it quietly sat there, long after the restaurant on the hill behind it had closed. 

More than 20 years ago, long before the day of portable phones (unless you were watching Star Trek or some other sci fi), I had driven to the camp with my sister-in-law, with, I believe, our pre-school children in the back seat.  We were meeting our husbands there later in the day.  We arrived at the camp and realized we'd forgotten the key.  They drive back home is about 40 minutes, so instead, we drove back up the hill and down the road to the phone booth, and called home.  My husband told me which window I'd be able to get open to crawl in and open the camp.  The phone booth saved the day!

Year after year, we'd drive by the phone booth, and as cell phones became popular, we wondered whether if would be taken away or whether it had been long forgotten by the phone company.  The phone book hanging inside was more than a decade old, and the booth was overgrown, inside and out. 

Last spring, I tried putting a dime in the slot, and nothing much happened.  A few days later, we stopped again, and this time I tried a quarter instead.  Dial tone!!!  I called my cell phone, and discovered the phone booth actually still worked!  What a surprise! 

I've photographed it in all seasons (though I can't seem to find the winter photos) and had planned to set up my plein air easel this fall and paint it when the leaves had begun to change.  Unfortunately, when we drove by yesterday, this was all we saw:

The phone booth quietly had disappeared sometime within the past week.  

Goodbye, old friend.