>>64286 (OP)>When did you realize you loved parks?Early 20s, back in university. Between classes I would wander in the cemetery nearby. It's not a park per se, but it's one of the old cemeteries of North America, and it's quite park-like. It's designed in the spirit of an english landscape garden (which you ought to know about, if you're a park lover!)
Anyway, there I've grown a love for vast expanses of grass, sober arrangements of lawn and pavement, landscaping elements like small hedges, bushes and fountains, long rows of trees beside a road, and of course, the shadows of the foliage slowly moving on the ground, which I had always loved.
>What is your favorite thing about parks?To me, they are the perfect union between the rich and messy details of nature and the orderliness and straight lines of civilization. These two things are not merely added together, they become something greater than the sum of their parts. Next time you see a neatly trimmed bush, try to notice this. Notice the leaves moving as one when the wind comes, then the branches and twigs underneath, with various fungi growing on them, and a dark globe of shadows sitting inside the whole bush, like a distant world that's just there. What would it be like to be a little fairy flying in there, from branch to branch, looking at the big things moving outside in the daylight? And then everything else around and under the bush, perhaps a few blades of grass that have been spared by the previous mowing, or a few chips of rocks lying in a spot of exposed dirt. So much stuff to see, yet all of it is channeled into this neat and powerful form we call a bush.
>What is your first memory of a park?Can't recall anything special from infancy. I had gone to some parks, but hadn't noticed the beauty yet.
>What is your favorite memory of a park?It's in that cemetery again. It was one gray afternoon in early spring, one of those first warm days that makes the snow melt down a lot. I was going uphill (the cemetery is sprawled on a mountain of some 200 meters altitude), taking random turns between the many tombstone blocks, as I would usually do. Then, I noticed this small rivulet going downward, born from the melting snow, naturally. I decided to follow it and find the source. On the way there, I had some fun by kicking some snow down onto the stream to create dams and see how the water would deal with it. In some cases it would go around it, in other cases it would break through after 2-3 minutes of accumulation. There was absolutely no one around, and I felt like a kid again.
The stream would get thinner and thinner, and many times I would come to a split and need to decide which one of the two I'd follow further uphill. Eventually I came to this flat area on the top of the mountain, where the fancier and older crypts are (one of them is some wacky ancient egypt style tomb, like something you'd expect in a theme park almost). There was a puddle just sitting there, between melting snow banks, next to the low wall surrounding that crypt. It was slowly flowing into a small depression in the pavement, that was the source.
>How often do you dream of parks?Rarely. I dream more about natural spaces arranged in a pleasant way than parks specifically.