We spent two October Saturdays fixing Grandpa’s old stands.
Brad’s four plywood boxes I tore down myself with a pry bar and a cordless drill. Patricia said I didn’t have to, but I didn’t want anybody climbing into something Brad built. Some of the plywood was rotting, and one of the ladders had a cracked rung he’d patched with duct tape. Duct tape, twelve feet up a tree.
Grandpa’s stands were different. He built them himself in the early eighties out of white oak he cut and milled on the farm. There were three of them, simple wooden ladder stands with a little bench seat and a shooting rail, set in the best spots on the ridge: one at the corner of the woods where the deer came down to the corn, one halfway up the ridge at the creek crossing, and one at the top overlooking the cedar bottom.
They’d weathered silver-gray over forty years, but the oak was still hard as iron. They just needed new straps, some new lag bolts, and a couple of rungs replaced.
Dale knew carpentry. Wes had a truck full of tools and opinions. Tim mostly carried lumber and didn’t say much, but he worked harder than both of them, and at the end of the second Saturday, he stood at the bottom of the creek-crossing stand looking up at it for a long time.
“My uncle’s stand looked just like this,” he said.
I bought new ratchet straps and safety harnesses at Fleet Farm, $340 worth, because Lyle at Farm Bureau told me to and because Grandpa would’ve wanted it. Wes inspected every bolt twice. Dale climbed each stand and bounced on it to test it, and at fifty-eight and two hundred thirty pounds, that was a pretty good test.
The second Saturday, while we were finishing up, a black Silverado slowed on County Road H, rolled past my gate, and kept going.
Kurt’s truck.
I didn’t think anything of it at the time.
Opening morning of the Wisconsin gun deer season was the Saturday before Thanksgiving.
I set my alarm for 3:45 and didn’t need it. I’d been awake since three, lying in Grandpa’s old bed in the farmhouse and listening to the wind in the oaks.
At 4:30, I filled Grandpa’s steel thermos with coffee. It’s an old green Stanley with a dent on one side from when he dropped it off the tailgate in 1987. I tucked my auburn hair into a low ponytail and pulled on a blaze-orange knit hat. Then I took Grandpa’s tan canvas hunting coat off the hook by the back door, where it had hung for three years.
It still smelled like him: pipe tobacco and wood smoke and cold November air.
I put it on. It was too big in the shoulders, and the sleeves came down past my fingertips. I rolled them up twice.
Dale, Tim, and Wes pulled into the yard at 4:45 in Dale’s pickup. They got out in blaze-orange vests and hats, rifles cased, breath fogging in the yard light.
“Morning,” Dale said.
“Morning,” I said.
Grandpa always walked his hunters in the first morning, so I did too.
Laura Bennett writes about complicated family dynamics, difficult conversations, and the quiet moments that change everything. Her stories focus on real-life tensions — inheritance disputes, strained marriages, loyalty tests — and the strength people find when they finally speak up. She believes the smallest decisions often carry the biggest consequences.