Ida had forgotten how beautiful good tea looked in a fine cup, the gold against the white. She took a sip, then she said boldly, “Sometimes your mind can be too free.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Sometimes your mind might tell you that Richard Nixon is in the kitchen cooking eggs late at night.” Ida had never told anyone about Richard Nixon; they had put her old friend Louise into Shady Rest Nursing Home after she told her niece that John James Audubon was living in her attic, and it had been all downhill from there.

But the Meals-On-Wheels girl didn’t even flinch. “Fried or scrambled?” she said.

“Well,” said Ida, nibbling on a scone, “they were scrambled eggs.”

The Meals-On-Wheels girl said, “You couldn’t pay me to eat an egg cooked by Richard Nixon!”

Ida smiled and the Meals-On-Wheels girl smiled back. The whole room smelled like a flower garden.

The next morning Ida noticed that the Heavenly Blue morning glories had made the long span from the last living-room window, and a little slip of vine was balanced on the top of the bedroom-door molding, reaching for the light. She got out of bed and put on her slippers, but instead of creeping down the hall clutching her bathrobe at her neck and peeking around corners, Ida marched right into the middle of the kitchen with her arms crossed and said in a strong voice, “You couldn’t pay me to eat an egg cooked by Richard Nixon!”

“Do you know any old songs?” asked the Meals-On-Wheels girl. “I play clawhammer banjo, bump-ditty strum,” and she did a pretty little dance across the porch. “‘I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground’? ‘Pig in a Pen’? ‘Praise God I’m Satisfied’?”

“I used to know ‘Once I Courted a Waxful Maid,’” said Ida.

“And?”

Ida hesitated, rocking in the rocking chair for a while, then she said, “‘With dark and roving eye.’”

“Whoo, baby! Keep going.”

“My daughter, Judy, hates those songs because the women always end up beat to death or stabbed in the heart.”

“Judy! What does she know?” The Meals-On-Wheels girl sat down on the swing with a pad and a pencil. “Sing me the whole thing.”

“I just think you’d enjoy your afternoons more over at the senior center, Mama,” Judy said that night. “A trained staff, planned activities, little craft projects to make you feel useful—”

“‘And deep into her bosom he plunged the fatal knife,’” sang Ida. “I just remembered! ‘Way down in lone green valley.’”

“—crocheting baby booties for newborns,” said Judy.

But Ida wanted to get off the phone so she could write it all down for the Meals-On-Wheels girl before she forgot.

“Look at all this nice stuff,” said the Meals-On-Wheels girl, looking into the hall cupboards. “It’s a shame the way this silver is all tarnished, and this linen yellowing along the folds.”