In 1943, my father served aboard the HMCS Rosthern, a Royal Canadian Navy Flower-Class Corvette tasked with escorting merchant ships across the North Atlantic while evading enemy submarines and torpedoes. Below deck, he transcribed Morse code messages alerting the crew to where Wolf Packs lay in wait. In the difficult hours between, he taught himself photography and processed his prints in the bathtub. He was twenty years old.

I thought of him often during the pandemic.

The war my generation was asked to fight looked nothing like his. There were no front lines, no visible destruction, no clear enemy to face. There was only the strange, disorienting experience of being asked to stay home — to batten down the hatches and wait. The casualties were real, but largely hidden from view. The battlefield was everywhere and nowhere at once.

Growing up the daughter of a military captain, I had been raised on a particular kind of stoicism: that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, keep your chin up and count your blessings. I tried to hold onto that. But the cabin fever was real, and so was the ache of being cut off from the people I loved. I found myself questioning whether virtual connection was any connection at all — and whether, once we retreated fully into that digital space, we would ever truly find our way back to each other.

So I did what I have always done. I went outside with my camera.

For the better part of a year I stayed close to home, exploring the landscapes around Richmond, Ontario — often in the early morning or after dark, when the quiet was deepest and the feeling of the world holding its breath was most acute. My Golden Doodle Saydee walked beside me through the snow. The forests, the empty streets, the frozen fields: these became both my refuge and my record.

Looking back now, what strikes me most is how much beauty existed inside that difficulty. The world stripped of its noise revealed something essential — about place, about solitude, about what we reach for when everything familiar is taken away. My father’s generation endured unimaginable hardship with grace and without complaint. I don’t compare what we lived through to what they faced. But I do think he would have understood the impulse to pick up a camera and bear witness even when — perhaps especially when — there is nothing dramatic left to photograph.