Local Tumbler Operator Enters Seventh Month of 600-Grit Stage; Family Begins to Fear Specimen Is Now Permanent Home Decor

The banding went in the first week of the fifth month, and Marta Kovac says she watched it go: a pale stripe of agate that had run the length of the stone since the field trip, rinsed away along with the scratch it was meant to prove. She is now in month seven of a 600-grit stage.

The club handout, photocopied so often the flow arrows have gone soft, allows two weeks. Marta is not behind schedule, she says; she is waiting on one specific scratch to disappear, and she can describe that scratch in the tone other people reserve for a sleeping child.

Harold Loomis, who lives with the tumbler, has become an accidental expert in what not to say. In month two he asked whether the stone might be finished. In month four he used the word "done" inside an unrelated story, and the barrel was still turning when he went to bed. He has narrowed his questions to two, both about sound: whether the barrel sounds tired, and whether the jar of water on the counter is for the stone or for him. It is for the stone.

The club's understanding of the specimen's progress is Inez Fenn's doing. Her monthly rockhounding update enters the tumbler line identically every time, "600, continuing", and the February minutes show the group reading "continuing" as near the end. Four members have asked to see it when it's finished; two of them have asked twice. Inez has not corrected them. She is a record-keeper, she says, not a chaplain.

On stage duration the dispute is not new. Filed under Kaito's Old Receipts: a motion in identical terms appears in minutes from the 1990s, moved by a member whose name the archive has lost. Here it was tabled on 12 October, the month Marta's stone entered its fourth month, and tabled again in March on Otis Vale's motion to table it.

Otis has since issued a ruling on the standards board's letterhead, in full: "Grit is a commitment, not a deadline." He defines a stage as complete when the operator reports the surface satisfactory, which places the finish line wherever Marta happens to be standing. The board did vote a ninety-day cap on any single stage. The cap takes effect, Otis noted, the moment the stone comes out.

What cannot be voted on is the provenance. The banding was the whole case: the reason the stone came home from the trip, the reason it went into the barrel first instead of last. Without it the specimen is a smooth, dense, faintly glinting stone of no established origin, which describes most of the barrel. Marta says she could still pick hers out of a lineup. She has been right four times out of nine.

It now spends more sessions on the shelf than in the barrel, standing upright beside the mail, where the family has stopped calling it the specimen and started putting things next to it.

Harold picked it up last night without comment and turned it over twice. "It's a nice stone to hold," he said. Nobody has argued with that.