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Winter has always been my least favorite season—those endless months of gray skies and frozen streets, where it feels like nothing can grow, nothing can move forward. Yet here I was, in a small town seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Clear Lake, Iowa, in the winter of 2020, was a place where the cold air felt like it was freezing my lungs with every breath I took. I was hired as a consultant to help assess a new video studio, a project that I thoroughly enjoyed. Little did I know there was a global pandemic about to sweep the globe, and ultimately come knocking directly on my door.
I wasn't expecting to be so captivated by this place. It was a small, quiet town with nice people, many of which grew up there and had no plans of ever leaving. Winter there wasn’t just a season on the calendar, it was something to survive, to endure.
Winter has a way of making you slow down and take notice of things you might otherwise overlook. Some people prepare for it, others just take it as it comes. But even with preparation, winter, both literally and metaphorically, can feel like it’s overstaying its welcome.
I finished up the project and decided to head to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to recoup and pretend to escape from the pandemic. At this point in my career, I was riding high —everything was just where it needed to be, or so we thought. My dad got sick with COVID in December of that same year, and ultimately took his life. His passing marked the beginning of a personal winter for me, it was a season of loss, grief. That winter, both around me and within me, reshaped everything—professionally and personally.
Photography has always been a way for me to process life. The photos I took in Clear Lake are more than just images—they’re moments of a time when the world felt like it had stopped. But even in the brutal cold, I saw beauty. There’s a stillness that can bring clarity, even when you're grieving or fighting to keep going.
I want to explore the idea of winter, not just as a season but as a metaphor for those times in life when everything feels barren, when progress slows, and you're just trying to survive. I think about that quote from Anais Nin: "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." It’s a reminder that sometimes, our hardest seasons distort our view. We feel like things will never get better because winter feels like it’ll never end. But it does. And with that comes the hope of something new.
This is not about offering up a list of “ways to get through tough times.” I don’t have a list. But I do know this—how we interpret the world in hard times is not always accurate. We need to stay self-aware, to recognize that our winter—whether in nature or life—will eventually pass. And while it’s not easy, it’s necessary.
This is the first in a series of my winter stories, I will be sharing more about my journey of losing my dad in upcoming posts, and as much as I hate the cold, there’s more to uncover—stories of frozen nights and harder seasons still to come.
