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Presented by benandsteve.com By: Benjamin Groff II©s

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My grandmother, whom I affectionately called Mom, often shared childhood memories filled with the enchanting call of the whippoorwill. She spoke of its song with reverence, describing it as a sound of pure beauty that she dearly missed. Her stories wove a special bond between us. They spanned the miles that separated our homes in Northeast Texas, Southwest Arkansas, and Southeast Oklahoma.

Nowhere else, she insisted, did the whippoorwill’s call sound as sweet.

I lived nearly forty miles east of her. It was on a farm where the evenings were alive with the calls of night birds. When Mom visited, I would take her on walks to the barns. We listened to the quail and other birds stirring in the brush.

“Mom, are those the whippoorwills you were talking about?”

I’d ask eagerly.

She would shake her head, smiling softly.

“No, that’s not them.”

Her answer certainly puzzled me. I knew the birds in our region. What I heard matched the description of a whippoorwill. At least, it did to my ears. Yet she remained firm. The sound she longed for existed only in the woods of her childhood, some two hundred miles away.

Mom passed away in April 1975, and with her, I thought, went the mystery of the whippoorwill. But fate had other plans.

Not long after, my parents decided we would take a trip. We went to visit my great-uncle Sam and great-aunt Dora. They lived in the very place where Mom had been born. I expected only a family visit. Yet, something remarkable happened as we settled onto my great-uncle’s front porch.

The evening air cooled as the sun dipped below the horizon. Towering trees stood like silent guardians, their leaves rustling in the gentle breeze. The Ouachita Mountains stretched beyond us, their shadows deepening as dusk settled in. And then, clear as a bell, I heard it.

“Whip-poor-will! Whip-poor-will!”

The call rang through the crisp and melodic trees, carried by the mountains and forest floor acoustics. It was so rich and hauntingly beautiful, unlike anything I had ever heard.

At that moment, I understood.

I knew why Mom had never heard it quite the same anywhere else. Here, and only here, the whippoorwill’s call possessed a magic she had never been capable of finding again.
I have never heard it since.

But in that fleeting moment, I was surrounded by nature’s beauty. I heard the echoes of the whippoorwill’s song. I found peace. It was as if I had brought her wish full circle. I was hearing the sound she longed for. I was honoring her memory in a way that words never could.

And in that sound, I found her again.

Hear the sound in the video below.

Learn about the Whippoorwill here!