Beginning of the Rainy Season

It is the rainy season in Japan which basically means that there is always a chance of rain, but very rarely is it actually doing so.  One encounters the outdoors at one's own risk.  The bike path is variably packed by people hungering for the riverside, or empty of those fearing a sudden shower.  I always imagined a rainy season to be sheets of rain for days, where the soundtrack of one's life became a peaceful haze of white noise, deleting all extraneous thoughts and masking all unnecessary words.  But it is something different.  It has a peacefulness separate from what I had expected, where the sound of frogs in the rice paddies oscillates in the drips of residual water.  The world is flooded by the impending heat and humidity of a millennially inevitable summer.  It's coming and it's already here.  It's been here all along.  But once again, it's our turn to walk upon it.