Stepping out of the choking humidity into the blissfully air-conditioned bus, I felt a weight lift itself not just off my shoulders, but off of my entire body. Summer has come. Not full-force yet, but the vanguard has arrived.
And they have already started setting traps for the unwary... Tonight on the way home from work I was clotheslined by my first spiderweb of the year. It was barely anything, just a few light strands of silk. A mere suggestion of what is to come, like the sole concert A played by a violinist before the start of a dramatic orchestral piece. Had this been August, I might not still be here to blog about it. As I wiped the sticky strands from my face, horrific memories of the grim architectural creations of these monsters began to creep out of the dark corners of my memory. Evil, twisted, gnarly sticky webs, meters in length, nearly the size of the trees that bore them. Ghastly three-dimensional towers of death, sometimes with five or six giant spiders sitting in wait for whatever prey may come along. Massive, deep networks of threads stronger than steel, probably big enough to immobilize a baby or small dog.
We recently had a scourge of caterpillars that nearly ate the trees bare, and now there are brown moths everywhere. And now that the season has started, out come the dani (ticks that live in tatami floor mats) and poisonous centipedes!
Japanese summer is never dull.
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