Foster Park

 Foster Park is just 5 minutes from TCU. It is a long narrow park with a creek that stretches most of the park and a duck pond. I have always driven past this park on my way to target, and I have always intended to go one day. It was not a great weather day; as you can tell, the sky was cloudy, and when I first got there, it started to rain a little bit, but it stopped almost as quickly as it started. The first picture here is the duck pond at one end of the park. In the picture, you can see a few ducks and some swans. I tried to get closer to the water to take a better picture, but the swans started swimming towards me and making deep trumpeting sounds as if they were getting ready to attack, so I quickly backed away. The duck pond was relatively small; a few ducks were sitting on the pond’s edge, curled up and sleeping. There was a man not that far from me throwing bread into the pond for the ducks to eat. The ducks swarmed the bread once it landed in the pond.

As I continued along the path to the other end of the park, I passed a playground where kids and their families enjoyed the day. A creek sat parallel to the path. It was relatively empty; the water was low, as seen in the picture below. Along the sides of the creek are lined with stacks of rock—most of the time, when rocks line a body of water, it is there to slow down the erosion process. In the picture, there is also a wooden bridge that traverses the creek. Barren trees are depicted in the picture on the side of the creek and behind it. These trees have fallen ill to the winter that is approaching. When the weather changes, and it gets cold, trees shed their leaves to conserve their resources.

            The next picture is at one end of the park. I tried inputting this picture into some plant identifier platforms, but I’m starting to think they are unreliable. All the ones I used gave me a list of potential names for these trees, but none looked like the trees in the picture. They gave me plant names such as Loranthus europaeus, Quercus lobata, Quercus douglasii, and Quercus alba to name a few. There was no motivation to take this picture. I just liked how we can see the abscission process occurring with the leaves that have already fallen off these trees lying on the ground beneath them. 

I took the last photo because it is uncanny. The photo shows a Christmas tree fully decorated with ornaments and a star sitting at the park’s edge. It is unnatural, but I did not notice it all when I first walked past this park area. But on my walk back to my car, this was one of the first things I noticed, and I knew I had to take a picture. One can jump to so many different conclusions about this Christmas tree. Did someone bring it to the park one day and leave it there? Did the town put it in the park (far fetch, but you never know)? Does it belong to the people who live beyond this photo’s hedges?  There is just a simple beauty in the unexpected, and it helps us see things from an inverted angle for a more meaningful experience.