Weather is the great leveler and winter, most of all. Whatever your personality, it becomes more so during winter: If you love drama, winter – striking, seriously intense – is your season. If you are prone to depression, winter can take you down, flatten you.

When I moved to Holland, MI just over a dozen years ago, fresh from a whole lifetime in Florida, I didn’t know what the hell to do with winter. It swallowed me up: first with cold darkness, night that began in the afternoon, then spitty snow – day after day – and then, weeks of wet, icy roads.

Four times during one week in February, I slid off the road, once right into the planted berm in front of OK Tire. I leaned on my steering wheel, weeping, while the tire men gathered around my car, silent. I was lost – and not because snow pasted over the words on street signs.

Every evening that first winter when I came home, I got in bed with a little tub of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey and, between spoonfuls, prayed for the dark, wet, weird horror to be over soon. It snowed too much for me to go outside. And it never really snowed enough for the world to be movie-beautiful. I turned chunky. I wept.

One day – three winters in – I realized there is no bad weather, there are just bad clothes. (From Florida I’d brought along thin, little, leather-soled ankle boots. Those were my winter boots, always had been. And an Irish sweater, thick as a mattress, or maybe a space suit, and stiff.) I pitched my weird clothes.

Newly outfitted with wool socks; waterproof, breathable boots; a lightweight, wool undershirt from Patagonia (a company I’d never heard of before); two pretty, new wool sweaters (layers! I kept hearing the word), and a credit card bill I decided to mark down as a medical expense, I went outside.

I felt like a bride. A polar fleecy bride.

I’ll never forget my first day, outside on purpose, in winter, in Michigan. A friend drove me to the Saugatuck Dunes in his car. I wanted to see the lake in winter. We stepped into the snow, new-made-bed perfect, and crunched to the North trail. In places, sand sparkled through the snow where wind had created drifts of meringue. Stepping along, in my new clothes, a bright pink scarf flung round my neck, rainbow-colored nubby mittens, I fell down backwards. On purpose. And burst out laughing.

Welcome, Winter! I think I love you!

To read continue reading this feature by Heather Sellers, a Holland-based author and English professor at Hope College, turn to page 20 in Michigan BLUE Magazine’s Winter 2009 Issue.