During the year before we moved north, Ron and I had made a batch of blackberry wine from blackberries we had gathered on San Bruno Mountain. It was in a large plastic garbage can which sat in my studio. Over the course of several months it gradually began smelling a lot more like wine rather than rotten blackberries, so we took it along with us when we moved. It was completely black in color, so when we bottled it in Peter's kitchen I made labels reading:
Chateau de Spodiodi
Black Death
1981
Estate Bottled

We gave most of it away, but only D and her boyfriend Creagh, who had taken over our old flat on Fifth Avenue, were brave enough to drink it. I actually still have a bottle of it, which will never be opened if I can possibly help it. It contains so much residue that it's completely opaque, and after 27 years I imagine it has gone way past vinegar to something that will rot anything it touches. It's sitting on my death altar, a good place for it, along with pictures of my Beloved Dead, bones, animal skulls, and the usual Witchy Crone paraphernalia.

That was our only venture into home wine-making, though Ron has periodically made noises about brewing beer ever since. It'll happen.

I had worked very hard over the years to reconstruct Compost Coven, initiating a lot of people and trying to get it rolling independent of me. I was High Priestess after Starhawk and all the others left, and I transferred the role to several people in turn: Leah, Linda, Decius, and then Leah again. I had also started a second group, called Sunshine because we met in daylight, with Jo Steen, Diane, and another witch named Thelma. Thelma was a nurse who lived in Calistoga but spent her work-week in San Francisco, so there was one Witchy contact in the Valley. But somehow we could never get anything going up there where she lived. Her husband wasn't a Witch, and she was pretty much in the closet, with limited free time. Some of the Composters would come up and visit from time to time, but I really missed all the people who used to come and go through my flat for classes, rituals, mojo-making sessions, and so on, which had occupied a lot of my time.

Some of them were pretty interesting. There was one woman, Mariette, who was extremely paranoid about being under magickal attack and was continually begging me for advice about protection spells. What I wanted to tell her, but was too polite to, was that if she didn't have such a suspicious attitude toward people she wouldn't draw negative energy from them. She ended up getting angry at me and stomping away in a huff, which is how every relationship in her life had ended. Some people just can't see patterns. There was Janine, a lesbian whom I married to her girlfriend Dean; unfortunately, Dean dumped Janine in order to undergo a sex change and marry Peggy, a woman who had formerly been a man. Dean and Peggy moved to the suburbs and lived as a straight couple (I always thought that they were certainly going the long way around to get there). And there was Joseph, gay as a goose and given to rolling about in the bushes with anonymous partners in Buena Vista Park. When I heard later that Joseph had died of AIDS I was not at all surprised.

One of my former students, Don, had moved to Japan to teach English at the same time I moved north, but kept in touch and let me know about this amazing shaman he had discovered, Dairyu-san. Dairyu-san was noted for dispelling curses and expelling fox-spirits; Don had met him through Yoshiko, a woman he became friendly with, an artist who was very involved with finding remnants of the folk-religion of Japan which were still in practice. Yoshiko took Don to many sacred sites which he never could have found on his own, and introduced him to people like Dairyu-san, whom he would never have met. He loved it in Japan because it was so very pagan a place. And of course, he fell madly in love with Yoshiko.