Thanks, Scrambler. What you describe is how I had things set up. But with that set up (currently how my site is set up for your reference), the Blog page does not show the “blog top widget area”. All settings the same as in my initial post.
When I was playing around and set up front page as “page with posts”, I noticed that the front page (as blog) showed “blog top widget area” but the blog page didn’t. Didn’t understand why.
As you can see with the current set up (per what you advise above and how I originally had it set up), the blog page, when front page configured this way (and posts page set as “select”), doesn’t show the “blog top widget area”. I haven’t decided yet which way I prefer (ie, with widget displaying or not), but was wondering what I was missing and how to fix it so that at least I had the option to choose either.
Hope that clarifies…