Once told from the hit television show The Wonder Years “Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.” Everyone has that one memory in life that they can revert back to whether it be big or small. My special memory that I will always cherish belongs to my dad and his deer lease we used to go to every hunting season growing up.
Every hunting season, November thru January, my dad and I would travel about two hours north to Graford, TX where his deer lease was located. The lease consisted of a small, cozy campground in the middle of our stupendous hunting terrain full of unimaginable winter beauty.
Days would begin for us before any creature even thought of waking, not even the sun . I loathed getting out of my warm sleeping bag to get dressed knowing it would be torturous as soon as that crisp air pierced my bare skin. After piling on the layers of clothing along with my hunting boots, gloves and beanie, I head out of the camper towards the small shack my dad and uncle built years ago where we spend a lot of our time. The rich aroma of coffee and bacon never failed to meet me at the door. After a quick breakfast, we load up the folding chairs and guns in the back of my dad’s old 1970 truck and head toward his hunting stand.
Riding in the bed of the truck, I am surrounded by the silence of the world around me left with only the soft humming of the exhaust pipe. Taking a deep breath, I could feel the cold fresh air fill my lungs. We make our way up the dirt road until we’ve reached the bottom of a rocky mountain where we then park the truck and get out. Looking up at the never-ending mountain, I always imagined it being a Jack and the Beanstalk adventure for me. Going over boulders and rocks, we carefully climbed our way up. As we make finally make it to the top, we reach another enclosed trail that lead us to our deer stand sitting off to the right in between two bushes.
The stand always looked like an undersized playhouse to me with just a couple small windows to peek out of. We quietly climb in, set up our chairs and get settled. Sitting there you could instantly smell the dampened wood of the stand mixed with the