I believe molds can be sorted into two classifications: There's the nostalgic type that settles in old libraries and woodsy cabins, the kind that makes you want to dance to Celtic music or sort through the old vintage appliances in your grandparents' basement.
Then there is the other pungent brand of mildew that causes you to wake up gagging on your dampened pillow at three in the morning, staring up at a leaking canvas ceiling.
Call it simple living. Call it contacting your natural alter ego within. Call it fun for all I care.
But the thought of being locked in a pop-up trailer for 12 days with the same four family members now lacks the magical flair that it used to hold for my childhood fascination.
Every year, my family and I would camp at Lake Lauderdale, a puddle bordering the states of New York and Vermont. It was a place where, "Dump Station!" and "Flush Toilets!!" were the highlights of the brochure.
And with each year of visiting, I found a new reason to hate camping.
Sometimes, it was the titanic mud troughs that formed after a day's rain. Sometimes, it was the playground infested with grubby, Kool-Aid-stained children running wild, and the apathetic sparse-toothed mothers who would occasionally swat at them between gulps on a Bud.
For whatever reason, each year's ideal notion of "camping" began to dim like charcoal after a burnt-out barbecue. And what good is used charcoal? It's not even a renewable resource.
I tried to see where this love of camping had taken a turn for the worse. I used to enjoy impaling worms on a hook. I didn't used to mind the lack of hot water in the washhouse or the bug-encrusted soap. How simply I forgave the person who belched after devouring an Italian barbeque, the pungent smell of sausage burning my nostrils as it circulated throughout the camper.
On most days, my sisters and I would swing lazily in the hammock, avoiding our required summer classics such as "The Scarlet Letter" and "How to Kill an Already Depressed Adolescent Girl by Giving Her Even More Depressing Summer Literature."
In the evening, we would go to my grandparents' house to play Uno. Grandma would pop a couple of pills and make up a rhyme for the cards' colors and numbers, slapping her hand on the table with each blast of insight.
"Green spleen! Red Fred! Two for blue, and that includes me and you!"
Sometimes she would sing songs about alcohol.
"Oh-ho-ho! Hee-hee-hee! Little brown jug how I love thee!"
Usually I asked her to take her teeth out for me.
Oh, and how could I forget the paternal Long Island relatives! The loud, highly fertile ones who chain-smoke and eat Crisco out of a can. The ones who group Buffalo, Cambridge, Rochester, Vermont, Canada, and basically anything north of Long Island together to form the globulous boundary of "Upstate."
Don't get me wrong, they were good people. They were great at playing poker, they were blunt and unabashed, they were always devouring Stephen King's latest piece of literature. I looked forward to their insight, to the tales of ex-third husbands that they would weave around a blazing bonfire.
There were barbecues, too. Oh, were there ever barbecues. Neanderthal Feeding Time consisted of stale bread and burnt cow that had probably been sitting in the bowels of my grandparents' freezer since the Depression. Without speaking, each member would stab a piece of meat with their pitchfork and swallow it whole. My mother would meagerly nibble at the corner of a bread scrap.
There were outings for food as well. One time, my emotionally disturbed partial-aunt (the one that sleeps in the nude) took us children hostage and drove us to an ice cream parlor. The problem was, it was the wrong ice cream parlor. She felt a sudden attack of schizophrenic paranoia that only insane half-relatives can feel as she was following my dad's car, and decided to veer off onto some back road. My parents searched for us in a panic, thinking the car had flipped into a ditch. I had a cookie dough sundae.
I never saw any of the bad parts when I was little. It was all good old camping in the woods with pine needles and magical forest creatures and hamburgers. The moldy, sweat-encrusted reality had not yet reared its ugly head. To tell you the truth, I kind of miss those days of yore.
Nah, not really.
