Silver Lake

Mr. Higgy-Piggie and I used to walk almost every night. It was a walk through the neighborhood, sometimes varied slightly, but we always went to Silver Lake Park. Silver Lake Park is a very tiny park on the edge of Newtown, at the end of the Newtown trail. It's so tiny and insignificant that when I called the Newtown Parks and Rec Department, they didn't know it existed. ("I don't think there is such a park," she told me. I wondered if perhaps my imagination is better than I thought.)

The park is really just a bridge over a creek, a couple of fields (no picnic tables or anything; just field), and a very short path to a small body of water that someone very generously called Silver Lake. It's a small, stagnant pond which we just called "Goose Poo Pond" as, well, lots of geese without a lot of water movement. They installed a fountain which ran for one year, and it actually seemed to help, but the next year, no more fountain, so we figured the funding must have run out.

For a small park, there was a pretty good diversity of animals. Geese, obviously, the occasional duck, one swan who would give us the stink-eye as if we were invading his space (who we referred to as "Belligerent Swan"). We would occasionally see beavers, who, one night, gnawed down all the little trees, then seemed to disappear. Big bull frogs, who always scared the hell out of me. Bunnies, squirrel, deer, that sort of thing. We could stand on the bridge and see the fish and turtles.

The last walk we took was the day we had our "big talk." We needed air, to get out of the house, so we did our usual walk, ending at Silver Lake Park. As we walked down the path, almost to the lake, I saw something in the path. It was some animal that had been dead a short while; I have no idea what it was. But it was awful. Other animals had clearly gotten to it. This horrible thing, there in the path. 

We quickly turned around. That was the last walk to Silver Lake.