This is the story of an heirloom that isn’t. Sometime around 1977, my mother painted a portrait of my grandmother, my father’s mother. The painting, oil on canvas, was pretty big, maybe two feet by three.

My mother framed it in her workshop down in the cellar, and gave it to my grandmother, who hung it on a wall of her tiny, wooden house, one town away from ours, a place we drove to, every Sunday, for ziti and meatballs and pizzelle.