Get Your Cow Out of My Kitchen!

By Catherine Hudson

Get your COW out of my kitchen will take you on an oft-times humorous journey discovering new creatures and how their amazing personalities captured the heart of a little red-haired girl. You will meet such memorable characters as Gomer Pyle, Fred the Emu, Shakin Jake and of course Clarabelle the cow. Even the book's title repeats the very words that Catherine's shocked mother said to her the day her daughter's half grown pet cow walked casually into the kitchen while the family was enjoying breakfast. Every chapter will let the reader discover a new relationship or encounter that have been a part of the author's childhood right up into her mid-sixties. As you read these short stories it will transport you to places and times that will trigger your own fond memories of pets that have shared your life. This is a book that can be enjoyed and read over and over by both adults and children alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hawes & Jenkins Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781637840313

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Get Your Cow Out of My Kitchen!

Catherine Hudson

ISBN 978-1-63784-030-6 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63784-031-3 (digital)

Copyright © 2023 by Catherine Hudson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Hawes & Jenkins Publishing

16427 N Scottsdale Road Suite 410

Scottsdale, AZ 85254

www.hawesjenkins.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

About Catherine

The Cecropia Moth

Cricket and the Snake

Gomer Pyle

The Killdeer

The London Hunt

Ridgewood Estate and Candyman

Clarabelle the Cow

Fred the Emu at the Petting Zoo

Ivan the Iguana

Hairy the Tarantula

Shaken Jake

Fluffy Cat

Angel the Lovebird

Rosie the Parrot

A Love Story—Chloe and Hannah

About the Author

Preface

This book was originally about the dogs I have trained over the years and was meant to only be a guide for those who hunger to become successful dog trainers or dog lovers who want their animals to be well-mannered members of their family and their community.

Instead, it has developed a character of its own. Rather than pages filled with facts and how-tos, it's become a chronicle of my life growing up around animals and the joy and sorrow they have brought me over the past sixty-plus years. Since childhood and right up to the present day, so many incredible creatures have come into my life, and this is a collection of just a few stories of some of the more memorable ones. Looking back on that time I can understand my insatiable curiosity with wild things but now as an adult I have learned how it is far better to observe and not touch them, whether it's a cocoon on a log or a baby bird sitting on the ground.

So by writing this book, I've allowed the floodgate of all the memories of my amazing life that was filled with a passion for anything that walked, crawled, waddled, hopped, or slithered to flow freely once again.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Kristen Thompson, my incredibly talented niece, who has taken many hours out of her busy days to edit my books. I cannot thank you enough.

I also want to express my heartfelt thank you to Mike Peech of Peech Artworks for his phenomenal cover painting and over forty illustrations. This gifted artist has gone far and above to bring my memories and Get Your Cow Out of My Kitchen to life.

I also want to say a huge thank you to my cousin Alexis Long for her unwavering encouragement and support, and to all my wonderful friends for all their prayers as this book took shape.

About Catherine

I was an average kid in many respects. I was just a little red-haired girl with long, naturally curly hair. I lived with my parents and had a sister who was two years younger than me. Before our family moved to London, Ontario, when I was six years old, we lived in Mississauga, a small city west of Toronto. Growing up there in the mid-1960s was a wonderful time.

My grandfather and grandmother had one son, Robert, and two daughters, Delia and Rosemarie. They all lived in an older brick farmhouse. When their oldest daughter Delia married, my grandparents decided to build themselves a more modern house on the lot next door. Then a few years later, when my mother married, my grandfather built another house for her that was only a few acres behind theirs and her sister's house.

My early childhood was filled with pleasant memories of running between all three homes through the open fields and huge vegetable gardens that were so common back then. Even after my parents sold their house and moved to London, my sister and I looked forward to spending summer vacations at our grandparents'.

We would arrive just after the last day of the school year at the end of June and spend the entire summer there until we had to go back home to start school in early September. I am not sure what the reason was, maybe because of lack of space, but I always stayed at my aunt and uncle's house, and my sister stayed next door with grandma and grandpa. A few years went by, and when I was around six years old, my aunt and uncle adopted a young girl named Alexis. She was only a year older than I was, and we were besties every summer, playing in the tall hollyhocks, making daisy necklaces, or building forts with old blankets under my aunt's forsythia and lilac bushes.

From a young age, I noticed I was not like most little girls. I was not interested in the latest Barbie dolls or playing dress-up. Instead, you would find me in front of my aunt's house knee-deep in a ditch full of stagnant water with my head stuck deep inside an old, smelly metal culvert looking for frogs or running full tilt across my grandfather's field of wildflowers or reaching with a butterfly net high over his gladiolas, which was just one of the exquisite kinds of flowers in his meticulously manicured flower gardens. I had no problem catching the common cabbage or sulfur butterflies, but then I would see a flash of yellow fluttering ever so effortlessly over the lilies at the far side of the long garden that encompassed the house. At that moment, everyone in the neighborhood could hear me screaming, Oh, there is a tiger swallowtail! and would watch me try to scoop it up in my butterfly net, which, to me, was the ultimate prize.

For those of you who do not know what an eastern tiger swallowtail is, it is much larger than most butterflies that you find in southwestern Ontario. Its appearance is quite stunning with its almost fluorescent yellow and black markings made up of swirls and stripes. What sets this butterfly apart, other than its size, is that each of its lower wings has a distinctive long tail. During an entire summer of bug collecting, I might only see one or two tiger swallowtails, so to catch one was my Moby Dick, my great white whale. They became the elusive prey that managed to elude me every time. When other children were playing in their sandbox, I was asking my grandfather to build me a special cork-lined insect box where I could display and catalog in meticulous detail all my unique and varied insects.

Although insects had interested me as a kid, they did not have the same pull on my heart that animals did. When I say animals, I mean everything from a salamander to a horse and all living creatures in between. The only thing I had an aversion to were spiders. I just couldn't get past their way of locomotion. They always move with a methodical, multi-legged, high-stepping motion that still creeps me out. They are the only living thing that I avoided and were my worst nightmare as a child.

One of my other favorite pastimes as a young child was running through my grandfather's field behind his house with total abandonment through tall fields of golden rods that swayed back and forth in the gentle summer breeze. My nostrils filled with the intoxicating smell of wildflowers in bloom all around me. As I ran after some magnificent butterfly sunning itself and waiting for a tasty catch of its own, I would occasionally see one of those giant yellow and black garden spiders. If you are not familiar with them, they are over two inches long in diameter, counting their super long shiny black legs, which they spread out in every direction.

Their favorite hunting method was to stretch their massive webs from one golden rod to another across a well-worn footpath. This location seemed to give them the perfect distance in which to build their expansive webs, which were almost invisible to the naked eye. They were skilled at using the tall weeds as anchors on each side of the path. Then, right in the middle of their web, they would lie in wait for some unsuspecting insect to fly into it. Only, more often than not, it was a little red-haired girl running with her head up to keep sight of that darned butterfly that just wouldn't land.

And then, to my horror, I realized that I had just run through a web. I would feel the stickiness of it on me and would jump up and down, screaming and stomping about. Oh, the memory of that feeling—of that web on me, and knowing that somewhere in it was a monster spider the size of my head, which I was sure was perched on my back—still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It would take everything I had to calm myself down, then only moments later, I was back in pursuit of something colorful that caught my eye.

Over the years, well, into my early teens, I continued to expand my bug collection. I remember one night, my family was sitting in our den watching a popular spooky television