Dolly's Diaries--Part I

Dolly kept her diary from 1954 until 1975, documenting her life in north-central Minnesota. If you have wondered what it was like to live without electricity, running water or telephones, her story will give you an insight. Between these pages is the story of her daily toil, her family's love, and how they survived after leaving Chicago. The Schumacher family blazed trails through the forest and did their best to make passable roads by using ingenuity and used equipment. They fished and hunted for food, often using the meat for trade for things they did not have. For instance, out on the prairie near them was a dairy farm where they could purchase or trade for eggs and chickens. When a cow was butchered, Bob would help and would get part of the cow instead of money, plus he saved the tail, heart, liver, kidneys and tongue. Dolly would carefully package her roasts, make many kinds of German sausages and would pickle some of it so it would keep. In the winter, of course, they would keep the meat up on the roof so the wolves wouldn't get it. In the summer, there was an ice-house full of sawdust from their portable sawmill and blocks of ice cut from the lake when it was at its thickest in mid-winter, and perishables could be kept there until the next cold snap. The two little resorts they carved out of the wilderness became a second home to people from all over the region and many of those people ended up to be life-long friends. There is no intrigue here, no great scary bear attacks, just a plain, simple and straight-forward diary transcribed by Dolly's Granddaughter in order to preserve them. Spring, summer and fall were chock full of work and lots of fun-especially when it came to meeting new people. Winters were long, the temperatures extreme and it was lonely sometimes, but Bob and Dolly stuck together and showed everyone who would notice what a true partnership in life is like. Through it all, there was always plenty to eat and lots of laughter. This writer once asked the family if we were considered poor. After thinking for a while, I was told that, while we may not have much money, we were rich because we had each other and we had everything we really needed.
About the Author: Shirley Dee Schumacher was raised on a resort in northern Minnesota and has lived and traveled in many areas around the United States, finally settling in a small community at the foot of the Black Hills in South Dakota. Her sense of adventure was, indeed, inherited. Shirley has raised many different kinds of dogs, most recently Karelian Bear Dogs for hunting. She has ridden the old logging trails in northern Minnesota on horseback, lived in Los Angeles, California and spent nearly seven years in Panama City, Florida painting signs and doing a little photography-but she still longs for the forests back home and for a time that was simple and plain. No matter where she has gone, Shirley has managed to meet some very crazy critters (mostly the four-legged kind) and has written a little about them in Ancient Waters and Other Very Short Stories, published June, 2013.