The Duck Park

    There is this little park near where I live, located in the center of a business complex.  An unusual place for such a pretty park, I think, but you sometimes find beautiful things in unusual places.  The grass is a thick and glossy green, with its share of wild flowers in the spring and summer.  Big hardy trees dot the grounds.  Cedar, maple, elm, and others I can’t name.  You can hear the breeze whispering through their branches on just about any given day.  It’s a soothing sound, at least to me, and I like to imagine the wind would tell me all manner of fantastic secrets if only I could understand what it said.  Sometimes other people are there when I go and we always acknowledge each other with a polite nod, but no one ever speaks, as if we have an unspoken agreement that idle chit chat would spoil the tranquility.
    It has a big pond, with cold, clear water, right in the middle of the property.  The pond is fed by a small natural creek that runs through and over a spillway to transform back into a creek.  There, a quaint wooden bridge has been built with wild grape vines twisted around the rails, attracting small birds who like to eat the fruit in summer.  It’s a good three or four meters to the rocky creek bed below where wild watercress grows.  Tall Cattails grow in dense bunches along the muddy banks, swaying in time to their own tune.
    There are benches here and there around the pond.  If you sit and wait, every now and then a turtle will pop its head out of the water for a look around.  I often wonder if they are watching me as much as I’m watching them.  A fairly large flock of Mallard ducks makes its home there, along with a few Canadian Geese, and they seem just as curious as the turtles.  If you stay very still they will surround you, honking and quacking, begging for bread crumbs.  There are small silvery minnows skimming the water along the banks.  If you walk to the edge they rush away into the deeper water, flashing like a multitude of sequins. 
    It’s quiet, a good place for thinking, or if you’re troubled, a good place for not thinking.  Often I go and just stroll around the pond, enjoying the way the sun reflects on the water, and contemplating how such a treasure found a home there in the middle of a large city.  You always hear about how you should stop and smell the roses once in a while.  That place is where I do that.  I’m not sure what its name is, everyone just calls it the Duck Park.