My name is Meredith Denning. My waterbody is Lake Ontario.

I’d like to tell you about the park near the house I grew up in. I grew up in south Etobicoke in a neighbourhood called New Toronto and the lake is about a block and a half from my house. So I grew up biking next to the lake and watching them turn old industrial land that was attached to the old mental hospital into a big new park. So they put turtle habitat there and there were a lot of bike paths. Everyone kind of ignored the sign that said don’t go here until construction is finished. Everyone used that park from the day it was there, bare earth and lake. Because dogs don’t mind if it is a finished park, they still want to walk there and kids like me wanted to bike there even if it wasn’t a finished landscaped park. These days I am doing a PhD in great lakes water management.