And then I heard it.

If you’ve spent any time around a forest in the Midwest, you’ll know the sound. The whip-poor-will has a call unlike anything else. It’s something that hangs in your memory. As for me, I hadn’t heard one in a long, long time.

And standing there, stock still in the parking lot, I realized that there were tears rolling down my face. I wasn’t sobbing, there were no normal spasms associated with that - but I was certainly crying. I don’t think anything like that has ever happened to me.

A bit of background is probably necessary to save my reputation here. I live in New York as most of you will know, but I grew up in Bay City, Michigan. I loved the town and still think it was a teriffic place to grow up. My parents also owned a farm on a large wooded property in the northern part of Michigan, somewhere between Fairview and Curran off of M-72. I spent large parts of my childhood there, since the neighboring properties were owned by my aunt and uncle as well as my grandparents.

We’d travel to the cabin nearly every weekend, and would spend weeks there during the summer. Holidays were particularly nice, as mom’s side of the family would pour up into the area. We’d have huge dinners in my aunt and uncle’s house, using their pool table as a buffet by throwing a sheet of plywood across the top and draping a huge tablecloth over it. The kids would all hang out in the loft after dinner and the adults would either be around the piano or watching football on TV.

I think my favorite times from my childhood are up in that place. When I became a teenager, I stopped going up there quite so often, though. I’d found other things, like games and some different friends, and I didn’t have too much in common with the rest of the family. I think I realized what was happening, but never thought about it too much.

Then in 1994, my senior year of high school, my grandfather got sick, and was diagnosed with lung cancer. He quickly faded from this near-mythic individual who survived tuberculosis during the Great Depression and lived through having a tractor roll over him, inflicting 3rd-degree burns on his legs (and a year later going back to working all 40 acres of his fields by himself) to a wasted figure on oxygen, lying on a gurney in the living room of their house. It was terrible to watch. And on the day after Easter, he died.

It was the first funeral I’d ever gone to in my family. I’d had a habit of avoiding them; it was like my own fear of mortality kept me from even thinking about confronting it. But I went. And it was difficult. For his faults, Grandpa John was an amazing guy and had a lot of character. And that’s something you miss.

Years passed, and I moved to New York in early 2001. I’d talked to my grandmother a few times since then, but I hadn’t seen her since the week before I moved. Earlier this year, at the beginning of February 2004, she passed away from a series of illnesses that had plagued her for years. I flew home and saw most of my family for the first time in close to five years, and in some ways it was like I’d never left. But in many more ways, and ways that were more significant, it was obvious that I had, and you never really can go home again. Not in the same way.

So with the passing of my grandmother, something seems to have changed in my own parents. There’s nothing keeping them up at the cabin anymore, since my aunt and uncle moved to Florida years ago, and my sister and her children live further downstate and they’d rather spend time with the grandkids than spend time up north. The most recent talk is that they’re planning on selling the cabin next year, as well as the house in Bay City and moving down to a smaller place close by my sister so they can spend as much time as possible with my nephews.

It strikes me that before last Thursday, the last time I’d heard the whip-poor-will was years ago, up at the cabin, lying on my bed with the windows open in late summer, listening to the sound of distant thunder and that soft distinctive birdcall. The next morning would be a trip out to Crooked Lake, and a big dinner with my grandparents and cousins.

Some things pass on in life, and I can’t feel bad for mourning that passing.