Another Michigan winter

Anyone living in Michigan knows just how unpredictable our local climate can be. Like a teenage girl neurotically trying on outfits before a date, Michigan's weather changes at the rate of once every three minutes.

Michiganders, for obvious reasons, are obsessed with each and every minute change in barometric pressure. Small talk often revolves around the current weather, the weather report, storms from years past and better weather in other places.

One thing remains the same from year to year, though. Our winters are consistently dark, dreary and freezing cold. Any Michigander will tell you Antarctica has got nothing on us. When we hear stories of daring treks across the Alaskan wilderness, we merely shrug and nod. We perform similar feats of bravery walking from our homes to our cars every morning.

The day before Thanksgiving, we got our first snowstorm. By Michigan-standards, the 6 inches that fell over the course of Wednesday morning and into the night shouldn't have been a big deal, but the sudden change in the weather surprised us all.

"What happened to fall?" we asked each other.

Like most years, fall came and went before we could truly appreciate it. That Wednesday afternoon, I opened my front door to an arctic blast of snow and wind. I temporarily retreated to fetch a warmer coat before braving the icy patch on my front step and the pile of snow waiting to be shoveled on my walkway.

As I scraped my car, I could feel the snow melting around my feet and soaking into my shoes. Summer had apparently spoiled me—my winter boots lay forgotten in the back of my closet. As the ice chips flew off my car into my face, hair and jacket, I knew I was having one of those days, and the weather was all to blame.

I skidded and slid my way to work in my glorified golf cart of a car to arrive 20 minutes late and soaking wet but proud I'd only hit one curb on the way. My boss was pretty cranky with me because the weather meant we'd be busy all night, so I squished around in my wet shoes and socks like a maniac to appease his temper.

Thankfully, the snow let up for my drive home, and although I was tired and irritable, I couldn't help but notice the trees looked awfully pretty with their snow-covered branches twinkling in the streetlights. Maybe my drive home for Thanksgiving wouldn't be so bad after all, I consoled myself.

Then I saw it.

As I turned into my neighborhood, a giant snowman sat in someone's lawn, beneficently smiling out at the passing cars. This wasn't any run-of-the-mill giant snowman, either. This was a 12-foot tall gargantuan snowman that must have needed a ladder to be completed. The head itself was so big that the builders used a flower planter for a hat and tree branches for arms. I imagined that the whole family must have bundled up and come outside to help with this holiday ritual. One person alone could not have constructed such a classic masterpiece of winter artistry.

If nothing else, Michigan weather brings people closer together as we all deal with it in different ways. Naturally, I laughed out loud at my grumpiness. Michigan weather isn't unlivable by any stretch of the imagination, and we probably sound like wimps the way we exaggerate every snowflake into the size of a baseball and every raindrop into a torrential downpour. Should we look on the bright side like the snowman-building family did, we might even find ways to see our weather as an opportunity to bond with our loved ones. Sure, the weather rears its ugly head from time to time, but most days the snow is just a mild inconvenience and a pretty one at that.

Now that winter has officially started in Michigan, I'm going to try my best to wear the appropriate cold-weather attire, give myself extra time for work and go sledding every chance I get. The next time my walkway needs to be shoveled, I might take the extra time to build my own front lawn masterpiece.