It’s official: This is the Big One, Martha. The wind outside is just starting to pick up, we’ve already got close to a foot of snow on the ground and we’re just now moving into the teeth of this beast. When we’re done, this might be the biggest snowstorm of my lifetime, with only the Blizzard of ’96 rivaling it.

That’s odd, considering I’m a Midwestern boy. But big-magnitude winter storms were rare when I was a kid, because there was no easy source of watery energy. You’d get snow all winter but it had a tendency to come in six-inch clumps. But here, if a storm spins up the Atlantic from the Caribbean and hits the colder air just right, we get storms of amazing magnitude (and other times, because D.C. is Just South Enough, we might go a year or two without any snow at all).

There’s something hopelessly romantic about a storm like this. You’re stuck inside where it’s warm and you watch as the snow covers everything that is gray and dull with something that is white and beautiful. It’s actually quite remarkable. Now, the romance goes away by Post-Blizzard Apocalypse Day 2, when you still can’t get out of your driveway and the snow has turned lumpy and ugly, but it’s nice while it lasts.

In the ’96 blizzard, I hiked the mile from my girlfriend’s house to the Metro station in the teeth of the storm, somehow got back to my Arlington apartment, called my dad and told him what was going on. That was the biggest storm of my then-36 years; this might be the biggest of my nearly-50. For now, I’ll just enjoy it; the shoveling will come soon enough.