Every night, Shawn Retter steps outside his home and makes a call from a phone in his front yard.
He picks up the receiver and talks to his mom, who died in 2017, and his friend John, who died a few weeks ago.
“It’s a one-way phone. There’s no dial tone. It doesn’t take minutes. It doesn’t take quarters,” Retter said. “But you speak into the phone and you say those things that you probably didn’t get a chance to say before someone passed.”
The phone in Retter’s front yard at 551 Clark St. is a wind phone.
The idea is: You say what you need to say to someone you’ve lost – and the wind will carry it to them.
Retter said he watched a couple videos about wind phones and then decided to build one.
“It was invented in Japan in 2011 by a gentleman that lost his cousin in the tsunami and he wanted to have a way to say things he didn’t get a chance to say or maybe say something he said before and he wanted to say it again,” he said.
Since then, wind phones have been popping up all over the world. Retter’s is the first in west central Illinois and one of just a handful statewide, according to a directory.
Like the first one in Japan, some wind phones are actual telephone booths. Others are just phones stuck on boards and nailed to trees.
“It’s really just the idea of how to use it. It doesn’t have to be very fancy. This was just some wood I had lying around in the garage. I had some stones so I made a stepping stone path. I made a stool for people to sit down,” Retter said.
His wind phone is a wooden box on a pole with a plexiglass door right next to a new flower bed he made to brighten the experience for visitors.
Inside, there’s the phone, a little hand sanitizer, a box of tissues, and a sign explaining what it’s all about.
“We hope you find comfort in expressing feelings and saying the goodbyes you never had the opportunity to say,” it reads. “As you talk with your loved one, let the wind carry your words into the trees and into the beyond. Grief is a natural response and is unique to everyone. Give yourself permission to feel whatever you feel without judgement.”
Retter’s wind phone is dedicated to his mother and his in-laws. He said he wanted to build the wind phone for his wife after she lost both of her parents, but he also wanted it to be for the community.
It’s been less than a month since he finished the project, but he’s already had a number of visitors making calls in his front yard.
He’s excited people are using it and would like to see more people take advantage of it.
But he also knows if someone’s out there, it’s because they’re missing someone, too.
"You know they're hurting. You know their souls are sore,” he said. "Even with that, knowing that they’re getting that moment to speak to their mom, their dad, their grandma, their grandpa, their brother, their sister. Anybody they want to. Just letting it go. The nice thing is, on a day like this, this is a wind phone and we have a nice breeze. That’s what it’s meant to be.”
Retter said he hopes to build another wind phone in Galesburg at a location that would give people a bit more privacy to make their calls.
Tri States Public Radio produced this story. TSPR relies on financial support from our readers and listeners in order to provide coverage of the issues that matter to west central Illinois, southeast Iowa, and northeast Missouri. As someone who values the content created by TSPR's news department please consider making a financial contribution.
