This is Jerry.
He’s a cattle farmer from North Dakota and is what you would call a good guy.
That’s what you’d expect, right?
Cattle farmer + North Dakota = A good guy.
That’s the equation.
Jerry was in town yesterday to drop off a load of beef. His sister attends our parish, so he parked his truck outside her house and that’s where we met him.
The kids and I.
And Ellie the Dog.
Hauling my massive self down from our 15-passenger barge, I lumbered over to Jerry and held out my hand. He grinned, and in his unmistakably ½ German, ½ North Dakotan accent, said, “You know how you talk to someone on the phone and have a picture in your head of what they look like?”
“I don’t match that picture,” I finished the sentence.
“You don’t match that picture,” he agreed. “You know.”
I’m thinking I was either much shorter than he imagined…or much broader…or both.
Jerry’s cattle (not to be confused with Jerry’s Kids) are 100% grain-fed—no steroids, no shots, no anything of that sort. We decided to order a ¼ of a steer, not realizing that this meant there’d be NO ROOM FOR ANYTHING ELSE in our freezer when we got home.
Got beef?
Why yes, thank you. Yes, I do.
Jerry knows all about feeding a large family; he’s one of 13 children himself. He said that growing up on the farm in North Dakota, the only things his parents needed to buy from the store were flour, sugar, and a few spices. Everything else they either grew or raised themselves.
I love that idea. Sign me up.
He also said that when one of his siblings did something naughty, his dad would punish everyone in the vicinity. “That way he’d be sure to get the guilty one, you know,” Jerry laughed. “We learned not to hang around anyone misbehavin’!”
For some reason he was looking at my children when he said this.
I have no idea why.
All for the greater glory of God,
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