Pictures of Home

It wasn't great art. In fact, even as a
young child I thought it was kitschy. It hung over the piano in my
grandmother's parlor, a little lugubrious, or maybe that was the
effect together with the other old-fashioned furnishings.

On a flat blue background, it was a
seated Prell shampoo Jesus with an unremarkable moon by his head.
Demurely contemplating how to get out of the mess he was in.

One day, a good thirty years later, I
walked into a holy space in West London, and there was the picture.
It unsettled me at first. Here was a little part of my family history
half a world away and I wondered what it was doing there. Over the
years I came to look forward to seeing it.

The house passed to my uncle who never
lived there again, but rented it to my brother for his weekend
bolthole in the country. Only now he has to leave it, taking the
contents, now his, with him.

I asked my brother about the picture,
and he looked everywhere but it was gone, probably tossed out soon
after my grandmother died.

Borders closed, a pandemic roams, race
riots rage, and the world is madness. I've been no further than two
miles from “home” since early March.

When my mother started down the road to
dementia she often fell asleep on the couch and woke up talking about
all the rooms of her house—that house in the country. Her mind was
organized room for room just like the house she grew up in and that
was “home” for her.

Later when she got to the point she
could no longer stay in her home of the previous 40 years and had to
be placed in a “home” (how cruel to call it that) she continued
to say she wanted to go home.

The staff said they all say that. What
they mean is they want to find themselves again. They want to go back
to when their life was normal.

Isn't that what the whole world is
looking for now?

I can't go back to my home in Virginia.
I can't even visit that little room in England with the kitschy
picture I've grown fond of. My grandmother's picture is lost to me.

But there's a little picture in my mind
with the peace creeping out of that meek and mild figure, stepping
across the picture frame, traversing the channel, and reaching me
where I wait in Paris.