Seven Minute Calls

I sat down on my grandmother's green couch, and dialed the numbers messily scrawled on a scrap of dark blue paper. I was seven years old, and my best friend, Sarah, slipped the paper to me after school, and told me to call her. It was the first time I had called a friend just to chat. 

Ring Ring

Ring Ring

"May I please speak to Sarah?" 

With those words, I became a phone person. 

Sarah lived about forty-five minutes away from me. Neither of us were in traditional neighborhoods with sidewalks covered in chalk drawings, and basketball hoops sticking out over garage doors, and kids playing outside until dark. We both had a lot of time to kill.

So we talked. And talked. And talked. 

The battery in my grandparent's phone died, and I switched to the wall phone so we could talk some more.

Those long afternoon calls were a haven of normalcy for me. 

We discussed very important things: the color we would paint our living room walls when we grew up and shared an apartment, who was the cutest in our class - Ryan or Ben, what songs we would be singing in Wednesday night choir, string cheese, who was cuter on tv - Zach or Slater (I was a Zach girl), all the ways her older brother drove us crazy, clay pits, homework, and whether she should stick with the purple color in her hair or switch to a light blue.

We talked a lot about books, and I'm pretty sure that one summer day she read an entire Baby Sitter's Club book to me during a particularly long phone call. 

When I wasn't on the phone with Sarah, there were calls to be made to Stephanie and Leigh Anne.

There were so many phone calls, my grandmother eventually got tired of me tying up her line, and decided some limits needed to be put in place. 

That was the day she pulled out the hourglass. 

She set it on the small table by the green couch, and explained that I could have one call a day, timed by the sand.

Sadly, although called an hourglass, this particular timepiece was only good for about seven minutes. 

A small stream of sand. 

Falling. Falling. 

Seven minutes. 

Now five. 

Now three.

"You have to talk faster, Sarah!"

The last grain of sand fell to the bottom and our time was finished. 

The phone hung up, I was back to the real world. 

The Red Dress Club Prompt:

Sand.

Did you talk on the phone when you were a kid? What kind of important things did you discuss? 

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