This year is our 15th anniversary, and, feeling nostalgic, we scrolled all the way back to the first days of our Instagram. Here’s a post originally shared by Connie Matisse on May 11, 2017—a lookback of a lookback at the earliest days of East Fork. “Alex and I met in the basement of an antique store in Madison County, North Carolina, in November 2009. I was selling goat cheese at the Holiday Market, he was buying leafy greens and little trinkets for family members as Christmas gifts. He didn’t buy any cheese from me—but a few months later, I moved in. He had just bought the property at the end of Ras Grooms Road, and, feeling like his little farmhouse was heavy with ghosts, still hadn’t done much more than poke his head into the bedroom on the second floor. That winter, our mattress was on the floor of the living room, in front of the wood stove. That’s where he first started doodling sketches of a workshop and a large, wood-burning kiln that he was planning on building. When he showed me those drawings, I nodded and smiled and gave grunts of encouragement—but I didn’t know what the hell I was looking at. I’d never seen someone use a potter’s wheel before, I’d never seen a wood kiln, and I had no concept of the ferocity that North Carolinians take to their ceramic heritage...” Caption continued in the comments.