When I was in my early teens, I spent a significant portion of summers staying with my grandparents at their home in Victor, Iowa. My grandpa was winding down the business he had founded and ran for decades, and would soon be forced to sell the house and move to a small apartment in a neighboring town.

He and I spent countless hours driving around in his S10 pickup exploring the countryside and looking for fishing holes. As we drove, he told me stories about all of the towns we passed through and highways we traversed. Stories about himself, about local history, about place names, and about how it had all changed. I drew maps of where we fished and kept statistics on what we caught.

The reality of my grandparents’ financial situation was rarely mentioned to me, and they seemed to do their best to enjoy our time together. I am not sure I really grasped the changes that were about to occur - the loss of something I still look back fondly on, and the end of my relationship with this idyllic (to me) small town.

Summer in this part of Iowa brings me right back to those days and reminds me why I have the need to endlessly document such places. A lot of things do change for the better but that doesn’t make our personal losses any easier to forget.