Since I was a child, this has been true for me. I remember so well the sight of docks stacked on the shore from October to May. Recently my sister and I drove around the lake on a wet day in late Spring. We stopped just before Mayville to see the Chautauqua Belle, which spent the off season on land there on the shoreline. The Canada geese strutted around the parkside as if they owned the place. No flowers bloomed, and the trees were just beginning to get a full head of leaves. Seagulls shouted above us as I got out of my Jeep. The dock was in! I was surprised to see it stretched out there in gray, cold water towards Dewittville, the land rising in a rolling hill on the far shore, the colors all sepias and grays from sky to dock.

You have to be from Chautauqua County to love this kind of day, I said to my sister. You have to be from here to think this is beautiful, she replied. And she was right. We have particular tastes about scenery and weather and landscapes. We appreciate a forlorn field, plucked by the farmer, left untended. We value the long hills of our county blanketed in snow for months on end, when the only color of the day may be dark shapes of bare trees or a leaden sky above. We find a dirt road in the country fascinating, charming even. And we love our lake even in winter’s cold, white embrace.

My grandfather Carl Forsberg lived on the shore in Fluvanna where he built his own home back in 1948. He had arrived in Jamestown in 1926 from a lake region in central Sweden. He had served in the Swedish navy. Carl loved the water. He built his house with a huge picture window overlooking the lake. I have a picture of Grandpa Forsberg in his first fishing boat with his beloved dog, Chubby. Carl had a fishing boat throughout my life, from a simple red wooden one in my youth to the sleeker, larger fiberglass one he bought when I was older. It had an Evinrude engine too slow to ski behind, but we tried anyway, lugging ourselves up and balancing for a while on slow-moving skis.

Carl put in and took up his own dock every year until he was 84 with help from his son in law, Uncle George. That spring his dock never went in. He passed away the second week of April, two weeks after his wife Gunhild. That year–1977–we lost our grandparents and our Aunt Ingrid who lived next door to them all within a few months. I can recall staring out at the white sections of dock, carefully piled and stored on the lake’s edge. Grandpa’s boat sat unmoving in the lot between the two houses there in Fluvanna. Later that summer, it was sold.

Grandpa Forsberg with Vicky and a muskie, 1960.

But more than the sadness of that spring of ’77, I recall measuring the year by grandpa’s dock. I would arrive to find him down at the lakeside, in his hip high green boots, finagling his dock sections, floating them this way and that, gracefully even, as he and George moved in unison to conjoin the sections. I felt like hooting with joy because that meant summer was here at long last. It meant boat rides with my hair blowing in the wind, grandpa smiling as he steered, my cousin Barb or my cousin Martha Jean perhaps grinning next to me. My dad loved Carl and that boat too. In the first 14 years of my life, Dad and Carl would head out for muskellunge together, spending long hours on the lake away from everything but nature and the enormous peace of the lake. Sometimes they would bring a back a fish the size of my little sister Vicky, who posed with grandpa and the muskie to record the catch.

Carl was quite the chef too. We ate perch and sunfish as well as bass and muskie that he had prepared in his basement so the smells of raw fish would not seep into the house. Gunhild was a sensitive wife whose house, much like my other grandmother’s, never had a cup out of place. So Carl cleaned and boned the fish he caught downstairs. Then he would bring up a neat plate of fileted fish, which he fried in his enormous iron skillet. I can taste that fish still and see it cooking there, bubbling in the butter and spices. They were grand meals, ones I never imagined would end. But as I write this, I haven’t had a bite of fresh-caught lake fish in 50 years. Sometimes life does that to us. Life changes, just like that. Half a century goes by in a whoosh. Memory is a blessing.

And so this time of year brings memories back of summers at Fluvanna, at lakeside, where we sometimes just sat on the dock, staring out at the water and across the lake to Celoron and Lakewood. We would lie on our beach towels there too, catching some sun, lolling in the heat. I can feel the slats of the dock beneath me as I recall this image.

Maybe it’s the change of seasons that keeps us here. So many people laugh when I say I retired from teaching in Florida and came back here to live. I’m surprised at their laughter. This place is home to me, and I’m bewitched by the county’s beauties from a field of fresh hay or corn to a fallow field, waiting for the season to change. A country road can draw me in just about any day of the year. I love the way the land spreads out from the Alleghany foothills on the east to the wetlands of the western county.

The first docks are in, say posters on Facebook, accompanied by photos of their particular lake views and their own docks that stretch out into the waters of our lake.

First dock in, Mayville, May 2017.

It’s a lonely place and wild, sort of, a jewel of a lake placed here at the end of a glacial moraine, the last stop in New York state and the last miles before the great Lake Erie ends it. It’s a place of wonder and beauty. So when the docks go in, we have the summer spread before us like a gift. The docks are in, seems a phrase that means renewed hope, another chance, time to feel glad to be alive. This water. This lake. This place.