The Twins
Monet's Garden at Sainte-Adresse hung over my grandmother's fireplace. As a child, this made perfect sense to me because I believed Garden at Sainte-Adresse was a painting of my grandmother's house. She lived on Jamaica Bay in Breezy Point, New York. Like Monet's terrace, her wrap around deck was lined with plastic planters of red and pink geraniums, impatients, and begonias. When you stepped off her deck, stained the exact, (the exact!) orange as the fence in the painting, you stepped directly onto the beach. There were fewer boats, true, and buildings in the distance (the skyline of lower Manhattan, no less), but when I was young correlation was enough. Sainte-Adresse and Breezy Point were the same to me. What was France? What was Europe? Who was Claude Monet? My grandmother's house, her beach, her waves, her red and pink flowers - this was the center of the universe.
