I like polishing raw opal stones. When I was polishing an opal one day, I thought, the powder that came off the stone smelled strange. That was when I started writing "Taste of Opal."
I wanted to show you this as in-my-mind example of "jet and opal blood blended evenly," which didn't happen in the story, but the polishing didn't go very well.
This is called matrix opal.

I cut a chunk off this and polished that chunk.

This is an opal I polished long ago. Sometimes, if you are lucky, you can see a beautiful blue among the green. This one kind of appears in the story.

This, by the way, is the first opal I ever polished. The seller recommended me something easy to polish.

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Published on June 11, 2023 18:50
The matrix opal looks like outer space when you polish it!