“Cut them off at the window,” Ida said to herself, and she actually did stand by the window for just a minute with a pair of big orange-handled scissors. It was nighttime, and there were no open blooms, just the drooping, spent ones from that morning already turning purple at the edges. But then the telephone rang. It was Judy, saying, “How was your day?” just like she always did. All Judy really wanted to know was if Ida was still alive and well enough to answer the telephone. There was always a sigh of relief from California after Ida’s hello, and the “How was your day?” was just extra talk really.

“Everything is fine,” Ida said, then she told a little story about Mr. Rice down at the birdseed store, so Judy could hear that her mind was still sharp and her speech not slurred. When they finally said good-bye and Ida went back into the living room, she noticed tomorrow’s fat, spiraling buds, and she put the scissors back in the drawer and went to bed.

In the morning Richard Nixon was in the kitchen again, scrambling eggs and then scrubbing out the frying pan with Dawn dishwashing liquid. He had ruined three frying pans so far. Ida lay in bed looking up at the white ceiling. There wasn’t anything she could do about these thoughts after all, but just think them and let them go on. By the time she washed her face and put on her dress and went into the kitchen, she had it straight. There were her frying pans hanging on their hooks, and everything was just as she had left it the night before. It was only that Richard Nixon dream again, she told herself.

That afternoon there was a new Meals-On-Wheels girl. The first thing about her was, she didn’t come to the back porch and bang the screen door and bellow out, “Meals-On-Wheels!” This new girl knocked on the front door, and when Ida opened it, she didn’t come bustling in, clutching the styrofoam tray against her bosom. Instead, she just stood in the doorway gazing at the morning glories.

“Now that is the prettiest thing I have ever seen in my life,” she said, and right then Ida realized why she had not been able to just cut the vines off at the window and drag them out.