I’m not sure I understand all of the previous post, but if need be, glannst, you can open a thread of your own to pose any questions you might have. I’m going to close this one as resolved.
That said, I didn’t reach a full resolution of the problem. None of the instructions I found about resetting the plugins folder added up, though I was able to get into PHPmyadmin and the FTP files.
I went into the pages editor and changed the page setting to private and unpublished (draft). Under Page Attributes, I changed to the No Sidebar Template. I also set up a featured image and then removed it but don’t think that had any effect.
Although my text is not aligned where I want it, the About text and image have reappeared. Some further tinkering may help refine it.