Until moving to Nashville three years ago, nearly all my life had been spent in the Midwest, where “four seasons” isn’t just a climate pattern but a personality test. Chicago, where I lived for most of my early adult life, was many things, but “sunshine city” was not one of them. Summers were a special kind of humid fever dream. I’d walk along Lakeshore Drive with sweat dripping down my back like I’d just run a marathon (I hadn’t), until I was brave enough to cannonball into Lake Michigan off the concrete beaches. I swear that first plunge each year felt like baptism by city water.
Winters, though, were their own sitcom. Picture me in a 400-square-foot apartment layered in three sweaters, radiator blaring, and every faux sun lamp I could find, trying to beat the seasonal depression I knew would come a few weeks before the first snow fell.
As the seasons changed, so did my mind. I used to joke that I was like a sunflower, only coming alive when the sun was shining. I never truly hated the cold (despite dramatically complaining about my parka, which belonged on a Mount Everest documentary, not…
