When I wrote a couple weeks ago about being tethered to the phone it got me thinking about my history with the telephone. My great-grandfather had a candlestick phone. If you are not sure what that is look it up. It was a pretty little phone that you held in your hand while talking. I am not sure what happened to that phone, but I would have loved to have it.

The phone at my grandparents’ house was a lightweight model – all black. It set on a table in the living room. It was the only phone we had. When you spoke through it you had to sit close by. While we had that phone, we were on a four-party line. That meant that four homes shared that line. If you picked up the receiver and someone was talking, you quietly replaced the receiver and waited your turn. Some of you by now are thinking how can that be? I think we were more patient then.

When I went to visit my grandmother who lived in the country, she had one of those wall phones that you had to stand beside to talk into the mouthpiece. You turned a crank to make a call. I was startled when I heard it ring but she did not answer it. She told me that was not her ring.

By the time I moved to the country, those phones were obsolete. My in-laws told me they used to have an operator move all of their calls forward. You had to call the operator and ask for the party you wanted so I guess this was progress.

I again was on a party line. I heard one other ring. I knew unless it was a one-long ring I was not to answer. I am not exactly sure how long we had that situation but it seemed like it was forever. That was the phone I referred to in a previous article. The one where my children got in trouble because they knew I was tethered to the phone on the wall.

By the time the children were in high school, we had a line of our own. When girlfriends and boyfriends called, we did not have to think of anyone else on our line. The children were each limited to one-half hour on the phone. They had to share. By that time, I had two phones in the house. There was a wall phone upstairs and another one downstairs. I opted for a very long cord so I was able to move around a little.

While my son’s parrot was living here it chewed off the cord so my son replaced it. At that time, I had to record messages to parents so children could keep up on their assignments. If the parrot made noise, I had to redo my message.

My son used to call after 11 o’clock to get cheaper rates. Do you remember doing that? I went upstairs to talk and his father used the downstairs phone. We had no heat upstairs so I had the ice box!

One year when he came home, he brought us a new phone. It had two extensions. You could take the phone off the hook and put it wherever you were going to be. All you had to remember was to put the thing back on the charger to charge it overnight.

Now, of course, people have cell phones. Sorry to say the children have trouble receiving calls when they are here. My cell signal is not reliable. I sometimes have service but more often than not I have nothing. I definitely cannot let my landline go.

I sent my son a message a couple weeks ago. He got it when I was on my way to my daughter’s for supper. He called to see if I had just sent him a message. I told him, no, that had been sent weeks ago.

After the Bucky Phillips episode I thought things would get better. The nearby fire department asked to go up on the back of my property to test coverage. A new tower was installed, but it had not been helpful.

Once when I was reporting an outage, the operator I talked to asked for an alternative number to call me back if we got disconnected. I explained the lack of cell service in this area so she did not bother making a note.

Although things are better today, we still have a log way to go to get what cities have. Our internet connection is not reliable either. My computer goes off and on. I have trouble getting these columns out at times. If my computer ever dies, I am all done writing. I am not about to go through what I had to, to get hitched up the last time. It took me four months and a lot of phone calls to get things started. I even had a computer tech helping me!

Ann R. Swanson is a Russell resident. Contact at hickoryheights1@verizon.net.