Grab it! Summer 2014 is slip-sliding away.

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Walking my dog around the block last evening, I observed more wildlife and heard more bird songs than I encountered on a recent trip out West. For two weeks I traipsed around the high country around Lake Tahoe, and I didn’t see so much as a squirrel.

True, I wasn’t sleeping in the wild, but I did get out to hike every day, and the only critter I saw was a tiny chipmunk. I spotted what seemed to be snake holes, but no snakes.

In the days since I got home, I have seen a black snake in my backyard, run into a line of raccoons loping across the street, heard an abundance of birds and a chorus of cicadas and, best of all, seen a dazzling display of lightning bugs every night when the sun goes down.

Where I stayed in Tahoe, tourists swarmed the mountains. Hikers with babies and backpacks lined the trails and people on mountain bikes zoomed up and down the peaks, so, amid the geographic isolation, there wasn’t the sense of peace and quiet I’d expected.

Here in my hometown on the South Shore, tourists are sparse. The trees are alive in the morning with the sounds of birds — everything from the sweet twitter of delicate songbirds to the cooing of doves to the honking of geese to the cries of gulls and herons. I’ve lived here a long time, but I don’t remember a season when the birds were so lively and so noisy.

Some years ago, as I walked down the block, a bird with an enormous wingspan swooped over my head and into the trees. I spotted its huge, bulky nest high in the branches, and I could see the tiny heads of chicks peeking out over the top of the nest. I returned the next day, and found a woman with binoculars and a bird field guide gazing up at the same nest. She told me the birds were golden-domed night herons. This year they returned again, and I watched them from early spring as they tended this year’s babies and eventually taught them to fly.

I have a sense as I walk through these beautiful residential streets that while I have traveled often to see the mountains and valleys and seascapes in other places, I haven’t paid enough attention to the home-grown beauty that’s right here at my doorstep. The 2015 Farmer’s Almanac predicts an unusually cold and snowy winter. We need to look around and absorb summer’s gifts while we can.

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