Other rodents, typically classed as freeloaders, may shelter inside your house in the fall. Someday you may be surprised to find a stash of dried peas and beans or sunflower seeds under your sofa cushions, hidden by little mice while you slept.

Even the common wild violet has a way to prepare for winter.

The other day I was weeding for my neighbor, digging unwelcome violet plants out of her garden paths, then transplanting them into my own garden. I love violets. Strange, I thought, as I lifted a clump and shook the dirt away: Underground, the plant had formed a ring of flower buds around its roots. Why would it produce flower buds in fall? And why would it flower subterraneously? The humble violet, as it turns out, has its reasons.

Unlike a scurrying field mouse or scampering squirrel, the wild violet is rooted in place. Its preparations for the winter months must of necessity be different from theirs. To ensure its survival, the violet produces two sets of flowers, one set in the spring and another set in the fall.

We are familiar with the violets that bloom in the spring, but not so much with the autumn flowers, which are produced asexually, and which never push up from the earth into the light of day. These are described as cleistogamous, literally “closed marriage” flowers. Their petals never unfurl. They eventually produce seed pods and release their seeds underground.

The violet’s spring flowers open their petals to bees and other pollinators; they reproduce sexually. These above-ground blossoms are described as Chasmogamous — pronounced hard C, as in chasm — which means, literally, “open marriage.”

Who would have expected to read a scandal sheet about violets when they picked up “Martha Sez” today? You never can tell about anything anymore.

Meanwhile, we are waiting anxiously for peak leaf season. Nothing hidden or secret about the maples and other deciduous trees when their leaves turn red, yellow and orange in October.

In the Adirondacks, we tend to have more seasons than are found in some other parts of the country, mainly winter, but also, in addition to winter and summer, mud season, sugaring season (who knew that the word “sugar” could be a verb?), leaf season and peak leaf.

Here in Keene, peak leaf comes later than peak leaf in Saranac Lake or Lake Placid. I always worry about it beforehand; sometimes it just doesn’t live up to my expectations.

The colors are starting to get underway here. Some years, peak leaf has been spectacular, coinciding with the three-day Columbus weekend, with blue skies, honking geese in migratory V formation and warm sunshine to finish the summer tourist season with a flourish.

Those years the color is sensational, and the view from Norton Cemetery or the Keene Transfer Station (the world’s most scenic dump) of vivid mountainsides against a preternaturally blue sky rivals what you’d expect to see on a picture postcard of the Adirondacks.

Keene has only one acknowledged intersection, known as “The Intersection,” where State Road 73 meets Route 9N to Elizabethtown. Right across the road is a field where the famous red barn once stood. Here photographers, amateur and professional, come from near and far to take pictures.

Other years, we see a muted palette of earth tones. Nothing spectacular. Clearly, it is not enough, but we are powerless to do a thing to improve it. With Nature, we get what we are served. As someone optimistically pointed out to me one year, “This’ll keep the leaf peepers home.”

What are you doing to prepare for winter? What are you going to be for Halloween? Do you know where you’re going for Thanksgiving? Have you put away your summer clothes? A young friend recently gave me an appraising look and said “It’s a good thing I’m not the fashion police.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you’re wearing white linen pants after Labor Day.”

Do as I say, not as I do, and have a good week.

(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the News since 1996.)