My Watermark is Lake Ontario.

When I was younger, before the age of 10. I would always spend time with my parents in Edward Gardens. While we were in Edward Gardens my parents would take us to feed the ducks, near the flowing water. The water was flowing to the point where the signs would say, “do not enter’ or ‘swim at your own risk.’ So whenever the weather permitted, our trips there, slowly become a weekly ritual. We would go outside and spend some time with each other, feeding the ducks. That experience was a very defining experience for me growing up.

However, there was a time, between 2004-2006 I stopped going to Edward Gardens for a while, because I was out of the country. When I came back to Edwards Garden one day, I immediately noticed there was a lot less water there, and it was quite dried up. From my memory, last time I went, there was lots of water, you could barely get in cause it was unsafe. Now however, you could see the floor of that stream. You could see the rocks at the bottom. Everything else looked the same, but there was just less water. As a kid, and even know I just can’t say if it was climate change that caused it or if they built a dam somewhere, or if they changed the direction of the water somehow that it just wasn’t flowing as much. I just remember that we went to feed the ducks, and there were no ducks to feed because there was no water for the ducks to be in. The ecosystem there had completely changed. It was a really drastic shock for me, when I realized this is not the same place I spent majority of my childhood. Even know when I go back, it brings back memories of feeding the ducks and spending time with my family. However now it's very different.

My little brother, probably wont have the same experience with that water or that park, that I did. Especially because the huge aspect of going to feeding the ducks and engaging with the environment, is no longer there. It’s kind of sad that now to get my brother into an environment where he could engage with it the same way I did, we would have to go further out.