Many things inspire me, but I would have to say most of my inspirations come from my childhood. With my mom, it was tea parties with the Queen of the Faeries, stories of the wonks that lived in our well, and spook-walks at night. She would read some of the best stories ever told from a phone book and the Sears catalog.

Mom also had a vegetable garden that grew huge vegetables and she would tell us kids that faeries came at night and danced among the vegetables and sprinkled their faerie dust and drop magic faerie coins to make them grow extra big. We would beg her to let us weed the garden in hopes we could find the coins; when we were done, we would count the coins. If we found more than five coins that meant that the faeries would allow us to pick a small basket of vegetables to cook a Magickal faerie stew, which we would make ourselves on a two burner hot plate out on the porch. I'll tell you, it was the best stew ever!

My mother also had beautiful flower and rock gardens with pathways to follow, I loved that. I would always play out there and bring the faeries thimbles of honey, milk, sweets and sometimes berries from the garden. And every morning I would run out to see what the faeries had brought me. Sometimes they would leave me candies, money, buttons, peanuts, etc. They never forgot me, not even once!

There was always magic with Santa, the Easter bunny, leprechauns, and the tooth faerie. I even made faerie furniture so that when the tooth faerie came to visit she would have a place to rest. Mom always made nature and holidays magical; I loved her for that.

But on the darker side, us kids also loved to be scared. Mom would do crazy stuff such as, step into my room, flip the light off, and say, 'I'm not your mother!' Or we would be playing in our bedroom with our friends and cousins and all of a sudden there would be a rap on the window. We would look up, and there was mom with a nylon sock over her head with a flashlight under her chin. Of course, we would all scream, and she would disappear. We also would beg her to talk us on her famous spook-walks. It was always dark and there was about eight or ten kids and my mom. She would tell us a scary story about the hobgoblins, the boogieman, or the wonks in the well. But sometime near the end of the story mom would start to say; 'Oh god, I can hear them, they're coming, there coming....run!' and then she would run. We would all start screaming and running and at times there would be crying. By the time we'd reach the house, our hearts pounding, tears flowing, we soon were laughing and begged her to do it again! I could go on and on with mom stories, but that would take a book to tell.

Something else I loved as a kid, and even to this day, I don't know who it was there, but every time there was a full moon, I would receive a phone call from the man on the moon. That was so cool!

The second person I have to mention is my auntie Zella. I loved her so very much. I would go and stay with her for weeks at a time. She lived in the woods about an hour or so from my parents. She had psychic abilities and was able to communicate with animals and the dead. In her home there was a young boy named Charlie. He had died on the land in the eighteenth hundreds. He haunts her house and spends lots of time in the room with the piano, Charlie was a stinker and liked to be mischievous. I fell in love with ideas of ghosts, goblins, mermaids, bigfoot, shapeshifts, elves, etc...

She also was a great storyteller. Camping was always thrilling; ghost stories around the campfire, calling for the coyotes into the fire camp. She also would call in the bats; they're a little bit scary when they buzzed her hair. But the thrill of the scare was always the best
part!

During the week, we would take walks in the woods looking for shape-shifting faeries and bigfoot, whom she says comes from the faerie realm and that's why they disappear so fast. That is also why we have never seen any bones of the dead. In her backyard, which was the woods, really late at night, she would wake me up and we would take ice cream, sit in the woods; in the dark very quietly, and the woods would come alive with magical creatures.

So now you can see where a freak like me became Lady Narf, Keeper of the Faerie magic that lives inside all of us.

Much love and Faerie Blessings,

Lady Narf