Looks like the rains have started. From my office window the water is a steady stream. Now, the water pouring forth from the sky is cooling, life-giving. Biking to school this morning I saw the happy wet birds flit and sing from half-drowned worm to babbling brook. Like the water-leaden bamboo, I can breathe again.

It will rain like this – or should, anyway – for the next three weeks. The rice paddies will fill to bursting with fresh, clear water. When the rice seedlings rice from the murk, the green is enough for a thousand prairie lifetimes, near tropical in intensity, more-so even, for it is shorter lived.

The frog chorus outside my bedroom window will turn baritone. City friends will claim fright at the cacophony emitted from the fields behind my house. What they are used to is the vacuum left by cars roaring past in the night.

As the rains progress, the heat will rise. Shortly it will be unbearable. Appetites will be lost and replaced with sloth. Air-conditioning and its false promises simply won't do. The only respite will be in the clear running rivers, pregnant with the seasons' rain. Surrounded by the immature shades of early summer and the fluorescent swim trunks of children playing hooky, I will drift downstream toward the Pacific and wonder why it is I'm leaving this place.