This means that we can now congregate for tea parties or sewing bees or canasta games or other oldster activities with impunity, I tell my friend Karen.

“What is canasta? Who is Impunity?” asks Zena, Karen’s granddaughter.

We have so far been enjoying a mild spring here in the North Country.

Aren’t we supposed to be having a blizzard about now? I’m beginning to feel nervous.

“We need rain,” remarks my friend Karen, a gardener. “The weather report keeps forecasting mixed snow and rain, but nothing. Nary a snowflake.”

“Uncle Biff says Daddy is a snowflake,” contributes Zena. Zena, 6, is sitting at a picnic table playing with Barbies.

“That’s because Uncle Biff lives in Florida where it never snows, and we live in the Adirondacks where it gets really, really cold,” Karen explains in her teaching voice. “Mountain people are strong and tough.”

“What dress are you going to wear?” one Barbie asks another Barbie.

“Also,”

Karen adds, getting into it, “you know that no two snowflakes are alike. Adirondack people are individuals. Do you know what individual means?”

“Oh, let’s see, I think I’ll wear this purple dress,” the other Barbie says.

“Individuals think for themselves, they don’t just follow the crowd,” Karen says. “Unlike Biff,” she adds darkly.

“No, I’M wearing the purple dress,” contradicts the first Barbie.

Once again, I am tending my seedlings, tender, perishable little sprouts that demonstrate my capacity for hope and faith or my extreme gullibility and refusal to learn from experience, depending how you choose to look at it. In the 30 years I have lived here, Keene has warmed from a zone 3 to a zone 4 climate designation.

What motivates North Country gardeners? A desire to grow food, a sentimental attachment to flowers remembered from childhood or just plain cussedness. Some people love a challenge. The Adirondackers’ determination to raise heirloom tomatoes might be compared to Israel’s plan to make the desert bloom.

I have been entertaining myself with two books during these early spring days and evenings when I can’t garden. “Wicked Plants” and “Wicked Bugs,” are by the same author, Amy Stewart. She writes in a lighthearted way about the down side of the natural world we inhabit and gossips about the appalling habits and appetites of certain plants and creepy crawlies.

Did you know that houses where bats live can be infested with bat bugs, similar to bed bugs, after the bats leave? This is one of the creatures Stewart gossips about in “Wicked Bugs,” letting us know that bat bug males engage in traumatic insemination, a mating practice that entails piercing the female’s abdomen to inject semen into her bloodstream. Sex-crazed males do the same to other males.

These bugs cannot be studied under laboratory conditions where they are unable to hide from each other because eventually they are all perforated so much they die off.

Most of the really scary and venomous plants, insects and arachnids Stewart writes about live in southern climes, but some, notably midges (no-see-ums), mosquitoes, blackflies, poison ivy and some popular garden plants, are plentiful here.

In “Wicked Bugs,” Stewart quotes a scientist, D. S. Kettle, as follows: “one midge is an entomological curiosity, a thousand can be hell!”

“Earthworms are not always as beneficial as people believe them to be,” Stewart hints.

“Nobody loves a maggot,” she confides, and cautions “Flea vomit is the true culprit in a plague epidemic.”

About the beautiful but invasive purple loosestrife, Stewart writes that its seeds can live for 20 years before they sprout.

“Those sensitive to poison ivy, poison oak, or poison sumac will break out into an oozing, unbearable rash. Since the oils can persist in sleeping bags, on clothing and in the fur of adorable little dogs, you may not realize that you’ve been exposed until it’s too late…

“Someone who has experienced a severe poison ivy outbreak could be very sensitive to the rind of the mango fruit or other parts of the tree.”

According to research conducted at a major university, traits shared by mountain people include adventurousness and originality.

“I would add contrariness and stubbornness,” I tell Karen.

“Snowflakes are very beautiful,” Zena says, unexpectedly.

By the way, the wasp crawling up and down your window pane is probably not a murder hornet.

Have a good week.

(Martha Allen lives in Keene Valley. She has been writing for the Lake Placid News for more than 20 years.)