Five Minutes of Song

I'm giving Five Minute Friday a try again this week. The instructions are simple-write for five minutes flat for pure unedited love of the written word.  Link back to Five Minute Friday and invite others to join in too.  Consider yourselves invited.  Finally, be generous and leave an encouraging comment for the person who linked up before you.

Today's prompt-Song

It's that time of year where something in the air assures us summer is just around the bend. Growing up I spent my summers at camp, first as a camper and later as a counselor. I remember the welcome hush that fell over a cabin at nighttime. Girls in my care, full of words and laughter and questions, finally drifting into slumber.

Days were lived outdoors in the summers of my youth. We swam and sailed and paddled, made the uphill climb from the waterfront and ran to capture the flag. We yelled 'red rover red rover come on over' under a sun drenched Chesapeake sky.

I remember the exhale at the end of a day. Crawling in to my sleeping bag, the sound of night all around. Sometimes I slept on top because this was camp, and the only air conditioning was a warm sticky breeze inching its way through a tightly woven screen. The only night light, a summer moon.

It was a good tired.

I closed my eyes and let the day fall away. It was always in this space between wake and sleep that her song began.  Not a softly whispered lullaby suited to the quiet place where day ebbs into night and back again.  Her song was loud, clear, distinct...a single line repeated over and over, winging it's way over and under and through a night forest.

Whip-poor-WILL....Whip-poor-WILL...Whip-poor-WILL...

It seeped into your head and before you knew it you were singing it too.

There is no mistaking the song of the whippoorwill. She's a bird named for the song she sings.  Onomatopoeia. A lonely sound, ethereal... she calls but no one answers.

Mostly though, it was aggravating to an exhausted nineteen year old girl trying to sleep in a cabin in the woods. I'd pull my pillow tight around my ears, trying somehow to block the unblockable.

Whip-poor-WILL...Whip-poor-WILL...Whip-poor-WILL

Decades roll by and memory piles upon memory. Every once in a while she calls to me still...different woods, same sad song. When I hear her sing the years fall away, and I go back to that place where dreams were planted and roots took wing. The place where tall trees kissed the bay and God felt close enough to touch.

Where the whippoorwill sang on a moonlit summer night.