Dream catchers

It's usually the oddest, most random things that set my memory a-spinnin'. Today, I happened to see a dream catcher hanging off of someone's rear-view mirror (to ward off the bad dreams one gets while driving, no doubt.) While the connection is indirect at best, it brought back memories of the Sundays I would have off while worked at a summer camp in North Georgia.
An aside: If you ever happen to find yourself working in the South with only one day off during the week, Sunday may not be the best day to choose, as pretty much everything that isn't a McDonald's or Wal-Mart is closed. I must have missed the day they allowed us to pick the day off we'd get during the course of the 8 weeks at camp. This wouldn't necessarily be a big deal, but seeing as how the rest of the week was taken up by 16-hour work days, the one day off was the only time to get anything done. (Wait...since when do I get anything done on the other days?)
Anyway, but I digress...that was seriously not the point of what I wanted to talk about.
That dream catcher reminded me of the time off I did have, and how I managed to spend it. In between various trips to Atlanta I took with the new friends I had made, I would take off for the roads on my own. On one of those occassions, I took off from the camp pretty early and eventually found myself in a town called Cashiers (I wasn't aware I was missing.) I got myself a cup of coffee and a good newspaper, and I sat down at one of the local coffeeshops. I was 20, away from home and the support system of friends and family that I had come to rely on to help guide me, yet I felt for the first time adult-like and liberated from that reliance. I had to do things on my own and make my own decisions, and while some of those decisions weren't brilliant in the least, for better or worse, they were mine.
I guess it's all part of becoming your own person, learning to rely up yourself. You need to break away from the things that you rely upon to create your own world and live by the consequences, and only then can you realize and benefit from the full value of those relationships.