In my dreams

I had this dream last night about my childhood. Which I guess I don't talk about all that often, except maybe to sometimes say that it was terrible.

It was a dream about the family vacation that we took every year. We always took the same vacation to our property in the upper peninsula. It was my family, my cousins and my grandparents. We all went for the 4th of July. My mother hated it and said it wasn't really a vacation because she still had to cook and clean. Anyway, I had this dream that we were on our way up north and I had all of this anticipation about all of the things my cousin and I would do (like rake houses out of leaves and make up stories about Ouija boards, among other things).

I always say my childhood was terrible from the time I can remember, and for the most part, it was. If there were good parts, I was too little to remember them. Pretty much everything I remember was bad and I find it very hard to identify the positive in it all.

But, the thing that I remember the most about those vacations is not the yelling that went into packing the car, but that it was fun. I realized when I woke up that there was a time when I was indeed oblivious to it all. When I didn't know that alcohol would be the undoing of most things. When I didn't realize that my parents hated each other. I actually can remember a time when I didn't know how terribly wrong it was all going to go.