This unconnected phone helps people reach out to lost loved ones

Somewhere along the Van Tassel Lake Trail in Digby, N.S., Jonathan Riley dusts the snow off an unconnected olive green rotary phone that's sitting on a wooden shelf, almost camouflaged in the woods.

He picks up the receiver, dials and starts to talk. 

Instead of entering a number, he spelled out the name of his late friend.

"I just share some of the things that she's been missing. I guess it's been six months now. I've called her two or three times from here. Just to stay in touch."

Riley, who is a trail co-ordinator with the Municipality of the District of Digby, set up the phone after seeing one on Instagram along the Appalachian Trail in New York State. 

"The idea just clicked with me right away that it might be something that would help people," he said.

Known as kaze no denwa, or "wind phone," the idea was born more than a decade ago in northeastern Japan as a way to stay connected to the dead.

In 2010, a garden designer named Itaru Sasaki was mourning the loss of his cousin and needed a place to release his grief. He set up an old-fashioned phone booth in his garden with an unconnected rotary phone inside.

"Because my thoughts could not be relayed over a regular phone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind," he said in a documentary by Japan's public broadcaster, NHK.

When the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami hit the area a year later, washing away whole towns and stealing the lives of nearly 20,000 people, he opened the phone to the public to help friends and relatives of those who died to deal with their grief.

That NHK documentary caught the attention of Newfoundland-born author Heather Smith.

"I was really struck by the children, the children that were entering the phone booth to speak to their lost loved ones," she said, "and I really wanted to capture that in a picture book."

Smith and B.C.-based illustrator Rachel Wada reached out to Sasaki to get his blessing to tell his story. 

"He did say, 'Please do so with a strong understanding of the reality of this disaster and just how devastating it was,'" Smith recalls. "I have a philosophy that children's picture books can deal with most topics and they just need to be told in a gentle way."