By Pam Stone

 

 

 

Coming in from the barn with my phone after noting the ‘low battery’ icon in the upper corner, I was banging open and closed the kitchen cabinets, and noisily pilfering through piles of mail and laundry until Paul, looking up from his breakfast, felt compelled to ask,

 

“What are you looking for?”

 

“My phone charger,” I replied, beginning to rummage under the dogs in their beds, dead to the world and snoring after their breakfast. “The battery is dead and I want to recharge it while I have coffee.”

 

“Why do you need it in the barn?” Paul asked, “Surely you don’t text and ride.”

 

“I film students during their lessons and then email them video clips of their rides,” I explained, digging through the thumb tacks, birthday cake candles, broken glue gun and half empty tube of hemorrhoid cream (like you don’t have one of these, too) in the junk drawer. Exasperated, I wheeled around and caught sight of it where I hadn’t thought of looking, the place it was supposed to be: tidily coiled up on the corner hutch, in easy reach of the outlet.

 

Plugging my phone into the cord, I stared at the screen and then muttered, with some irritation, “There’s something wrong with the recharger. It’s not charging.”

 

“Probably don’t have it plugged in right,” offered Paul, unhelpfully.

 

“Of course I do,” I shot back, holding it up. “It’s not working, we need a new one.”

 

Paul sighed, and rising, the right side of his brain leading him, took it from me.

 

“No, no,” he said, opening the junk drawer once again, retrieving a safety pin. Opening it, he began to insert the point into the bottom of the phone, explaining, “I’ve been reading about this. Since people carry their phones in their pockets, lint builds up in the connector socket and you just have to dig it out.”

 

A sliver of green matter flew across the kitchen.

 

“Or,” added Paul, with distaste, “in your case, hay, and, oh, gross, was that a flake of dried horse turd?”

 

I stiffened. “It might be,” I replied. “But don’t ask me the vintage.”

 

Paul slapped the phone and pin, still stuck in the bottom, into the palm of my hand. “Here, you do it,” he declared. “I’m not going to dig horse turds out of your phone.”

 

“I’ll have you know,” I said to his back as he departed the room, “that today is ‘Giving Tuesday’ and you’re supposed to give freely with your time, talent, or treasure!”

 

Crickets.

 

I plugged the phone back into the charger. Success!

 

Really, as we all seem to be attached at the hip to our phones, I thought, pouring the long awaited coffee into my favorite mug, it’s only natural that they might absorb what we subject them to in our daily routine. The phones of carpenters must be filled with sawdust. Teachers, chalk dust. Politicians … well, with politicians, my phone might have quite a bit in common!