Back in the day I can remember spending hours on a snowy Sunday afternoon playing Monopoly with my parents.   As I recall, it was always a coup when your token landed on “Park Place” and you acquired the deed, so every time I write about, or visit, the landing that juts out over the big drain at Council Point Park, I think of that game and the high-priced property known as Park Place. Today, that fictional piece of land, in reality, might be something that is part of the Trump empire or, in Detroit, a Dan Gilbert acquisition.

When I first began walking at Council Point Park, the water’s edge was a gem where geese, ducks and even swans, and their young, would gather. Whenever I tossed out tidbits of stale bread to them, it took me back to happy times at High Park in Toronto where my parents took me when I was very young. I’d have a bag of bread that Mom cut up for me, which I’d gleefully fling out at the birds, and, even though my aim was not so good, they’d come close to me, creating much noise on their part and eruptions of giggles and squeals of laughter by me.

Well, that was cheap entertainment, but I am richer for the experience.

I also am glad for the nature books my parents bought me and those little trips which helped instill a love of nature in me.

The Park has changed though this past year … sometimes I think it looks a little unloved.

I feel badly when I climb down from the trail to stand on the drain nowadays, as all I see is a still and rather-murky Ecorse Creek, devoid of water fowl. Even the waterlilies that are floating on the surface are missing their blooms … and their frogs.

But, while this concrete precipice at Council Point Park is absent wildlife these days, it is still a wonderful little place for reflections – whether it is your own visage peering into the water, or a place to evoke memories from the recesses of your mind. Sometimes this Park place is merely a venue to appreciate the reflection of the trees upon the water when the sun hits just right. Such a scene, hopefully, I’ve captured in the photo above.

I am reminded of this quote by Henry David Thoreau: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

I left the house early today as I wanted to get out and enjoy my walk in the Park before the humidity and heat and humans permeated the Park experience.

This morning was such a time for seeing more than meets the eye and looking at the Park through rose-colored glasses to see the beauty. It was so very peaceful and quiet, as it was early enough that the crowd had not yet arrived. I savored the solitude and enjoyed having the Park to myself, save for a few songbirds that insisted on injecting their music into the silence of the still morn, or, perhaps the occasional teensy splashes in the water of Creek inhabitants like turtles or fish who were coming up for air.

I read online, just this week, that communing with nature on a daily basis increases your ability to concentrate and gives you more brain power – really?! Too bad you can’t bottle up that experience and sell it, huh?