Arlington Heights is a little less wild

The recent photo in the Neighbor section of the lively garter snake sticking its red tongue out at the photographer recalled for me the last garter snake I saw in Arlington Heights.

It was a long, leisurely, "What is so rare as a day in June?" Sunday afternoon in the 1950s. I was napping. My husband was taking a walk. He came in, bubbling with enthusiasm. "I've brought you a surprise." Pregnant at the time, always hungry, I looked up expecting that the small paper bag he was carrying held my idea of a treat. A pint of ice cream. Maybe peach. The bag was exactly the right size.

"Open it carefully," he said, as he put it on the sofa next to me. It wasn't cold.

But I was still hopeful. By now I should have known, knowing him. The snake enthusiast I had married had brought me a darling (to him) specimen of the genus Thamnophis, species sirtalis - the common garter snake. He'd found the little darling warming its coldblooded body on the Oakton Street sidewalk.

It was unmistakable with its three light stripes running along its body.

When I showed a neighbor the Neighbor picture, which I was surely meant to do, we agreed that there have been many changes of species in Arlington since we moved here.

He commented that now even earthworms were gone. He'd been digging all morning without bringing one up, even from his mulch pile. Another neighbor, a native, agreed. Knowing how Arlington was once a virtual orchard filling huge areas that are now subdivisions, I asked him how the farmers dealt with the omnipresent squirrels. Squirrels had long stolen all my pears before they were ripe and thrown the half-eaten fruit to the ground.

"We didn't have squirrels," he told me. "For squirrels you have to have tall trees." He went on to tell how he missed the crows.

"They kept down the bunny problem and I could raise lettuce."

A reader might wonder what we did with our garter snake. We thought it appropriate to let it go in our back yard. But, with less sense than a bunny, it was caught sunning itself on a neighbor's driveway the next day. He tossed it down the sewer, and all the recently imported city folk on the block expected it to turn up in their toilets for weeks.

While on the subject of fauna in Arlington Heights, my favorite was the cigar-maker's gander. Every afternoon when Mr. Herzog strolled uptown for his errands, his great white gander would swagger at his side. Then, to quote my book, Old-Timers' Reunion, "the nervy gander would hoist his handsome grandeur into the town fountain" (pictured in the Peoples' Bank calendar this month) "and sail regally around." Thirsty horses were out of luck until Mr. Herzog finished his errands.

Mr. Herzog's cigars, in their elegant boxes, were called "Gander Cigars."