It's not easy remembering all the names and faces of long ago.  Sometimes it's downright maddening.  At other times it's so frustrating that she's moved to tears.  So what's a 94-year old great grandma supposed to do about remembering?  These are trying times.
Evelyn Goldschmidt lived alone in her apartment, doing most things for herself, until about four weeks ago when she fell in the bathroom and broke her right arm and bruised her hip.  Now she scoots around in a wheelchair at Good Samaritan nursing home in Waconia, her feet a-goin' like she's in a go-cart at Raceway Park.  "No, I can do myself!" she says politely but determinedly. 
It's not easy losing some of her independence, just like it's not easy losing some of her remembering.  So what's an independent minded lady supposed to do about bruises and a broken arm and sharing a room in a nursing home?  These are trying times.
A resident of Victoria for several decades, Evelyn and her late husband Harold lived and worked and raised their family on Lake Zumbra during other trying times which today can put a glint in her eyes and even bring out a little laughter in their retelling.  If you steer in the right direction, sometimes remember-ing isn't so tough after all.

"I was born at home," said the dear little lady sitting forward in her wheel-chair.  "I will be 95 on July 29^th."  If you count backwards, the year was 1910.
"My parents were Emil and Louise Wolff.  She was a Sauerbrey girl," explained Evelyn, one memory at a time.  "Their nationality was German.  I had six sisters and two brothers.  My sister Grace is the oldest, then Ruth and then me.  I was born in Laketown Township.  We used to live in Augusta, then Mound a lot.  My mother and dad also lived in Chaska for a while.  I went to school in Chaska till eighth grade, not a country school but the school in Chaska."
Did she attend high school?  "No way!" she exclaimed.  "I think I had to work a little bit.  I had to work with my mother.  We had to clean in the sugar beet fields.  We hoed the beets."
Sometimes remembering got easier.  "I was baptized and confirmed and married at the Chaska Moravian Church and then after I got married we went to the Victoria Moravian Church," she said.  That church in Victoria is otherwise known as the Lake Auburn Moravian Church.
Evelyn's husband was Harold Gold-schmidt.  "We were married on April 20^th in 1928," she readily recalled.  "We lived at Zumbra Lake.  It used to be called Goldschmidt Lake.  I don't know why the name got changed.  I wish it was still Goldschmidt Lake.  Fred Goldschmidt used to live there.  Harold and Herb were his kids.  You take that road off Number 5 and you go to the end of it.  That's where we lived."
That dirt road off State Highway 5 has come to be a paved street called Park Drive.  Today Park Drive is an access to a couple of small neighborhoods and also the public access to Lake Zumbra where fishermen slip their boats into quiet waters on the lake's south side.
The Goldschmidt farm and several other area farms were turned into Carver Park in the 1960's.  The land is now beginning to resemble its earlier days, before the plow, when American Indians hunted and lived here midst prairie grasses and the Big Woods.
Had there been a honeymoon trip for Evelyn and her "nice and handsome" husband?  "There was no honeymoon," she replied.  "They had to work in the fields.  They had corn and some oats once in a while.  We had to husk the corn by hand. We had cows.  I helped milk.  That's why I have trouble," she said, slowing moving her arthritic fingers as though the cow were standing right there in front of her wheelchair.
When Evelyn uses the pronoun, "they," she is referring to the Goldschmidt brothers.  "I married Harold and my sister Alice married Herb," she said.  "We lived in the same house on the Goldschmidt  farm by the lake.  Herb and Alice lived upstairs.  Harold and I lived downstairs.  Then Herb got tired of it, and Harold and I did it.  It was hard work."
The remembering began to flow like milk from the milk cows.  "We had 128 acres, Harold and Herb did.  Their dad gave them the farm.  They used to have four horses and then they got a tractor.  I think it was a green one … We had some chickens and a few turkeys and some pigs.  My husband picked the eggs.  I didn't.
Referring to these decades of the 1930's and '40's, she said, "We canned the meat in fruit jars.  We didn't have ice for all that.  Jim Kaley used to cut block ice out of the lake.  They had a house down there for that. 

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