This October marks the second anniversary of Hurricane Sandy barreling up and pounding the East Coast. It was one of the most destructive storms in history and it greatly impacted my freshman year.
Originally, the storm was poised to hit Delaware straight on. The University urged students to go home and cancelled classes for the beginning of the following week. Of course, not all students could make it home, and I was one of them. More than half of my floormates left and campus felt so deserted it was eerie.
However, being on campus for Hurricane Sandy was one of my most memorable experiences of freshman year. It started off with a wiffleball game on the first morning of the storm. We were told to stay in our residence halls, but we were rebels (and the weather wasn’t too bad) so we went to play on the turf in the cold wind and pelting rain. It didn’t last long (due to the weather conditions), but it was a blast.
My favorite memory was the last supper in the dining hall. Essentially, we all received an email telling us that the dining hall would be closing due to the storm and that we could pick up pre-packaged food to eat instead. Naturally, my floor coined this the “Last Supper” before the storm.
The dining hall that night was a mad house. I am not kidding when I say there were students grabbing enough sandwiches and drinks to last them for a week instead of two or three days. Some were actually filling large plastic storage containers food. It was a fight to get a place on line to grab the rations before they were gone.
But then we did something I will never forget. As this was the “Last Supper”, my floor thought it would be funny to recreate the similarly titled painting by da Vinci. So picture in the middle of all this madness, a group of people posing oddly around a table. The looks we got from others were priceless. Then, one of my floormates (shout out to the lovely Becca LaPlaca) superimposed our images onto that of the original “Last Supper”. It looked awesome! It is still one of my favorite pictures from college thus far.
Da Vinci himself couldn’t have done better
The rest of our hurricane break consisted of a Hurricane Banquet, where we all dressed up and brought our pre-packaged sandwiches to the lounge and ate together, and watching hours of TV while waiting for the power to go out (it never did). Fortunately for us and for the University, Sandy’s path changed, and Delaware did not end up getting the brunt of the storm.
It is certainly safe to say that that the weekend in October was one of my favorite memories of my freshman year and a moment that sums up my experience in Honors at UD. I mean, where else would you find a group of students who would appreciate (and enjoy) posing like a da Vinci painting on a Saturday night?
~Rebecca Jaeger
