I can’t resist writing about my next-door neighbor. We all call her “Lucky Debbie.”

Whether shoving quarters into the slots at a gambling casino or searching for a Lake Superior agate, she always comes up a big winner.

On seven trips to the Bay Mills Casino last year, Debbie won more than $15,000—$4,200 once, $7,000 once and more than $1,000, several times.

An avid rock hound, she found a mother lode of an agate last summer—a beautiful specimen measuring 4×7 inches and weighing nearly 4 pounds. Internet sources say it is worth about $4,000.

Debbie, wife of Ben Musielak, a Sault Ste. Marie fire department lieutenant, says she will never, ever sell her prize agate. “It is so beautiful. I keep it in a special jar of water to show it off to my friends,” she said.

Lake Superior’s shoreline from Whitefish Point to Ontonagon is alive each summer with rock hounds in search of the many-colored agates.

Agates are 1 billion years old. They were transported by the glaciers and polished by many years of wave action.

Agates are very hard and beautiful stones that make beautiful jewelry, such as rings, brooches, earrings and more.

Learning to recognize an agate on the sandy shoreline or in the water is a skill one gets after lots and lots of trying. In that area, my wife, Darl, is an expert. Over nearly a half-century of agate hunting, she has collections by the bushels. She and our daughter, Linda, had so many that they began to put them out in their flower gardens. Thank goodness, I gained room in my garage workshop. Darl used to cut and polish agates until she became allergic to the oil needed to run the diamond-cutting blades.

One agate-hunting trip, about 40 years ago, is still a nightmare for Darl. On that trip, she found a very big and beautiful agate. She carefully put it down in a safe place on the shore. Meanwhile, our son, Steve, then about 7-years-old, who was always trying to throw all the rocks back into the lake, picked up Darl’s prize agate and threw it way out in the deep. Darl cried and she has never forgiven Steve to this day. Because of my blindness all these years, I have never found an agate. I go with Darl to the shore, where I lay on a blanket and take a nap. Sometimes though, I listen to a Detroit Tigers game and sip a cold beer. I enjoy agate hunting.

When Debbie’s big agate put her on the front page of local newspapers, it really shook up two of my friends, Earl and Joanne Johnson of Newberry. Earl, retired commander of the Newberry State Police post, and Joanne spend all summer hunting agates.

“When we read ’bout Debbie’s agate and what it was worth, we rushed out into our flower garden and retrieved two agates we put out there that are bigger than hers. I had no idea they had that much value,” Earl said.

If I owned one of those, I’d turn it into a Caribbean cruise.