Wowee! We've got a Landscape Agate.

If you read my posting in September of 2011, you know that Derrill and I have become rockhounds. Well, that's not exactly right. He's become a rock hound, and I'm his sidekick. We've done a couple of field trips, but mostly we go to rock shows and buy from people more able to climb around on hot, dusty rock piles.



As with all our new passions, we accumulated stack of books about different kinds of rocks. I particularly love our agate book. It has lots of spectacular pictures, including a couple of fabulous landscape agates.



Landscape agates are just what they sound like--agates that are colored like a picture. There's no way of knowing before you cut into it what an agate's going to be like on the inside.



So, we got this Brazilian Agate at a rock show silent auction. We probably paid $2.50 for it. About the size of a small grapefruit, the outside was scabby and brown. When we got home, Derrill stared at it for several days before he started cutting.








He brought the first cut into the house as soon as it came off the saw. We marveled at it and thought we were lucky to have such wonderful banding, and we loved the little circle that looked like a sun, hovering in a blue sky.












This was the second cut. I called it 'Crystal Mountain' and thought it was spectacular.






When he brought the third cut in, I couldn't believe it. It looked to me like a seascape, perhaps with the cliffs of Dover in the distance.

The sun in the blue sky was back and stayed for the rest of the cuts.




The fourth cut looked to me like Grand Canyon in the evening, when the colors go all blue and purple, and the clouds are tinged with the pink of a dying sunset.





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The Fifth cut, mostly white, reminded me of a snow avalanche I saw roaring down the mountain at Juneau, Alaska. It plunged across the road and into the sea.










The sixth cut reminded me of a cubist's painting of a seascape with a steamship steaming along.

< There was one more that was like an abstract painting, but I managed to delete it, so can't hang it here.

But, you get the idea. I smile every time I see it and wonder at the beauties of the earth hidden beneath an ugly, scabby exterior. I never thought I'd see a landscape agate, much less have one sitting in my living room. I feel truly blessed.

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