2020. Some won’t even say it out loud. It was like curse.

As I look back over 2020, I too see a lot of the pain that came for me personally that included a failed relationship, a 1400-mile journey to a place I’d never been before to put myself in a town where I didn’t know one person’s name.

I knew that in making the move, it would be a hardship financially and that it would take me losing pretty much everything. I would have to declare a bankruptcy to make it happen, and so I had to be sure it was the right place. And did I really want to start over?

Only three years before I was living in a mansion that I had restored in Michigan, I had the support of family, financial security, a respected job and pretty much sat on the top half of the world. If life has taught me anything, it has been that things can change quickly and drastically.

In three years, I had eight eye surgeries, health insurance that wasn’t what it claimed, a house that wouldn’t sell a job I couldn’t do with one working eye, pain killers that became my best friend and a family that couldn’t stay. Oh, and four moves.

So of course, when 2020 came, it was like, anticlimactic. I started over. I put my nose to a grindstone, kept my head down and did what I loved to do. I wrote and I took pictures.

Now, I have won awards for writing from the Wisconsin Press Association, the Minnesota Press Association, The Iowa Press Association and the National Newspaper Association. Since I have been here in Wyoming I have written hundreds of stories and taken thousands of pictures. I also was encouraged to enter my work in the Wyoming Press Association’s contest for 2020.

This last weekend, I was both shocked and surprised to now be able to add awards from the Wyoming Press Association in state competition that had judges both from the state of Montana and from the National Newspaper Association.

I would love to express my gratitude and my thanks to first of all, my publisher Rob Mortimer who hired me away from National Geographic and gave this old warhorse a chance to once again become part of a news family.

Mortimer is the kind of publisher that sends me an encouraging scripture every morning, and has not only supported me in what I do – but realizes that the calling on my life MUST run congruent with my destiny in order for a legacy to be valid.

I also have two editors who I highly respect and depend upon, Logan Dailey and Ton Winter, from the Guernsey Gazette and the Platte County Record Times. They make me look better than what I really am and their encouragement has also been fresh water to a very thirsty soul.

And I also must mention my office manager Bailey Rutt who not only encourages me every day, but is a constant source of all things Wyoming. I couldn’t do my job without these people who have taken me under their Wyoming wings and made sure that I was welcomed home in Wyoming.

And Finally, to the many people who have opened their living rooms and offices and most of all their hearts to share their incredible stories with a total stranger. To have someone trust you like that is humbling. I would have nothing without the people of Platte County. Their stories inspire me, they drive me and they make me feel like family.

And when I look into their eyes and am allowed to snap pictures, they share with me all the spiritual fingerprints that have been imprinted on their souls. It’s a wondrous thing to look back at where I’ve come from. Miraculous really. And it’s a good feeling to know that in the month of March in 2020, God sent me home to Wyoming and gave me a family unlike I’ve ever known.