Finding Treasure in Porter Gulch

Cleaning out the shed - 🌿MEMOIR

Katie Sharpe on Unsplash.com

We were poking around in the decrepit old shed out back, attempting to clean out all the broken and mildewed junk before the roof fell in. In Porter Gulch, the brush, the poison oak, and gravity win the battle over neglected outbuildings hands down; the whole structure was beginning to collapse and would be reclaimed by nature before long. We’d finally decided to get everything out and over to the county dump before it did.

We’d spent over two hours in the dank and dark, disturbing indignant mice and sleeping spiders. Very little was salvageable. We dragged out broken chairs, drawers so warped they would not open, old rusty tools, cardboard boxes full of broken 78s, a lampshade chewed by rodents, three old boots, a box of damp National Geographic from the 1930s, and a rolled up carpet even the dog would not want to sleep on. You get the picture — the usual rural flotsam, now ending up in the back of the pick up, destined for burial.

Ariana Prestes on Unsplash.com

“Hey, Ma? Look at this. What about this?”

“Let me see,” she squeezed herself through the clutter to join me near the back. “Oh, that old thing. That’s just an old picture I got a long time ago. Let’s turn it around, I think it’s got a picture of Jesus in there.” I moved a couple of splintered wooden crates and a defunct paint-sprayer to get at it.

“Let’s have a look.” Yep, an old wooden picture frame, a nice one, except for the gold paint that someone dabbed on it with a rag in a moment of creative abandon. Under the glass was a picture of an unlikely, blonde, blue-eyed Nordic-looking Jesus. Just an old paper print, stained and creased. “Did you put this picture in here, Ma?”

“I did, yeah. You know why? Because, well, you remember Lizette, right? Well she painted a picture of herself and gave it to me in that frame. Tell you the truth, I didn’t like it much. Didn’t look like her at all, so after a while, I stuck that calendar picture in there on top of it. I had it hanging up in the cabin for a long time, then I got tired of it and moved it out here into the shed. Maybe ten years ago now.”

“You know, it is a nice solid frame, Mama. Why don’t we take it home with us? I could clean it up, get that old paint off of it. What do you think? Maybe we could have a mirror put in it for your bedroom? Might be worth saving.”

“Honey, you can do whatever you want with it. It is just out here mouldering away.”

We brought it home, wiped off the cobwebs, pulled out the nails and took the backing board off of it. I extracted the stained and wrinkled print and tossed it into the bin. (Sorry, Jesus.) We studied Lizette’s naïve self-portrait. Right. Not very attractive. Into the bin with Jesus.

Then I noticed there was something painted on the backer that I had removed. Lizette evidently hadn’t bought a new backing board for her artwork, so she just flipped over some other painting she had and used that. I examined it carefully. Let’s see...oil on board, wind-bent cypress trees, a view of the sea in the background. It was dirty, covered with yellow nicotine stains from a lot of years living with smokers, but I liked it. It had that 1920s Carmel-by-the-Sea feeling. Then I noticed in the bottom left corner there was a signature, nearly obscured. It looked like “William … Silva.” My heart skipped five beats. William Silva? William Posey Silva? Nah, couldn’t be. Suddenly, my mind was already out on a trip to the Antiques Road Show.

Cypress on the Shore by William Posey Silva

We had the painting professionally cleaned, the gold smears removed from its original frame, and then we placed it into a Bonham and Butterfield auction in San Francisco and took a deep breath.

After having been in the old shed for heaven knows how many years, the painting sold for $5500. We celebrated with a couple bottles of champagne. It has become one of our favorite family stories.

We never did finish cleaning out the shed. We’ll get around to it someday.