Arlington resident's return completes the circle

Jane Bedingfield Stavoe, who lived her childhood in Arlington Heights, and her husband Ron walked out the front door of their new condo in Arlington Town Square at 77 S. Evergreen and strolled down Campbell Street to Dunton House.

They were newly moved in. At Dunton House, the first person they met was Patrick Harris, whom Jane had known in Daisy Daniels' nursery school 60-plus years before. Reflecting on the town she remembered and the town she had come back to, and the pleasant coincidence of running into Patrick Harris, Jane thought contentedly, "I'm back. The circle is complete."

Arlington Town Square is only blocks from the carpenter-gothic frame house where Jane remembered her mother on August days of long ago bent over "a caldron of steaming fruit," which Jane's father had grown in the back yard. "The sweat would be running down her face."

Mrs. Bedingfield was no different from any of their neighbors. Summer was hard-work time, time for putting up the fruits and vegetables that the family would subsist on all winter.

"We never bought anything but meat," Jane remembers. "And not a lot of that. Oh, and eggs from Mrs. Wielinski's chickens across the street." Cellar shelves were lined with jar after jar. Jelly and fruits and vegetables.

Summer was also racetrack time. While the horses raced, the track dominated the village. Jane's next-door neighbors moved to Oshkosh during the season so they could rent out their house to the exercise trainer for the famed racehorse Citation. Some families moved into their attic or their basement to cull extra cash from racetrack employees.

What Jane had good reason to associate with the racing season was the traffic on Euclid Avenue, which never seemed to slow down during the morning hours as track patrons came, mostly from Chicago. Or, for that matter, when the exultant, or desolate, bettors were on their way east after the last race of the day.

The traffic was fast, furious, seemingly unending, and one day Jane was caught by its intransigent pulse. While she was hanging from her back yard trapeze, she was hit in the head by a swing seat.

The Bedingfields did not yet have a car. Jane was bleeding profusely. Dr. Leckband was on the other side of the Euclid traffic. It took some time for a driver to notice a mother with a child bleeding into a white cloth on the curb. In those early days, there were no stop lights to slow down people racing out of town. Jane never forgot.

But an even deeper memory of the Arlington of her youth was the glorious herbage that her father attended. He was a devoted horticulturist. When Jane left Arlington, he dug irises from his back yard to establish horticultural continuity for a new home. Those irises are now growing on the terrace of Arlington Town Square.

To Jane, it was possible for her and Ron to move into a high rise, a symbol of modern Arlington, because that condo came with a large terrace with already established shrubs and flowers. Now, there are also the irises that are part of her father's heritage. From father to daughter, as he said, as he dug them from his beloved yard those many years ago.

"The garden is the connector," Jane says.