"How did I paint them?" Ida Tollenger answers. "All you have to do is show me a bunch of lilacs. I love lilacs."

Her smile quickly fades, as if she's trying to remember something about painting the flowers - or maybe to forget something. It was so long ago.

The acrylic painting is propped against a wall in Ida's apartment at Twin Towers Senior Living Community in College Hill. She sits in a bamboo chair, her silver-gray hair smartly swooped back.

Ida's shoulders are little stooped. She uses a walker with wheels to get about. And at age 98, her hearing and memory are fading.

But on this day, Ida is feeling good about herself. As she should. In August, she hosted an art show at Twin Towers, selling 75 of her paintings for as much as $500 each. Quite an accomplishment for anyone, at any age.

"Why weren't you there?" she scolds gently.

More than 140 people came that night to see her work and talk with her.

"I'm afraid I'm a great talker," she says, sheepishly. "What surprised me was, people would say: 'I used to paint.' "

Early start in art

Ida has always painted - despite her parents' wishes. As she was growing up in Cincinnati, her parents believed a young woman should become an office assistant or a secretary. Certainly not an artist.

Ida proved them wrong.

In school, she took stenography, but also art classes. She worked for Gibson Greetings, coloring in graphics by hand. She remembers designing a card once, showing it to her boss and telling him that, if he didn't want it, she'd take it to the card company up the street.

"He didn't want it," Ida says. "Neither did the company up the street."

But her boss at Gibson took her back.

She giggles.

Ida went on to study art at the University of Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Art Academy and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Soon, she met her husband, William, in New York. His job with the government took them to Chicago, Thailand, Japan and Washington, D.C.

Always drawing

Everywhere they lived, Ida painted what she saw. She kept a sketchbook in the glove compartment of their car, just in case. The brown paper wrapping peels off a few of her favorite paintings, and the memories come back.

There's one with Japanese farmers working in a field, blue-green inlet and snow-capped mountains in the background.

"I was sitting on a hill watching them," she says, looking at the scene with a hand over her eyes, as if the sun is glaring out at her.

Another overlooks a canal in Thailand, with a proud rooster and chickens in wooden cages waiting to be loaded on boats. The heat seems to ebb off the corrugated tin roofs of the buildings.

In one painting of Thailand, there is a strand of forbidding barbed wire juxtaposed against a serene "spirit house" - about the size of a bird house - where Thai people burn incense to welcome protective spirits.

Ida has problems distinguishing certain colors, which prevents her from painting much now. But the stark whiteness of snow in another painting is clear to her eyes.

"That's the path to my neighbor's home right through there," she says, pointing at a break in the thicket.

She painted the scene looking out her window, when she and William lived in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York - before he died and she moved to live in Twin Towers in 2000.

Ida is quiet again.

Was there really a pretty red cardinal sitting in the tree?

"You don't ask those questions," she says.

E-mail cmartin@enquirer.com