Chapter One: Love Notes

Love Notes is Chapter One of Kilnfolk — a story about quiet devotion, handwritten rituals, and the love that stays.

This chapter honors the way love lives in ordinary moments: coffee poured quietly before the house wakes up, notes left on the counter, hands brushing in passing, and the rituals that tether us to one another.

Each piece in this collection is hand-painted, signed, and created in limited batches as a physical edition of the story. No two are exactly alike, because love never is.

These pieces are meant to be held with both hands.
To be filled again and again.
To become part of someone’s everyday story.

CHAPTER ONE: LOVE NOTES

There was a time when love wasn’t announced.

It didn’t live in captions or grand gestures or expensive gifts wrapped in shiny paper.

It lived in small, ordinary moments.

In a handwritten note left on the kitchen counter.
In coffee poured quietly before the house woke up.
In the way someone lingered just long enough to say, “I made this for you.”

Some of my earliest memories of feeling deeply loved are tied to mornings like that.

And the truth is, the only place I ever felt unconditionally loved as a child was at my Granny Sylvia’s house.

That was the safe house.
The soft house.
The house where nothing was demanded of me.

The house still half asleep.
The light just beginning to spill across the table.
The smell of Folgers coffee settling into the walls.

And a note.

Sometimes it was waiting for me on the counter.
Sometimes it was tucked beside a cup.

And sometimes it came from my dad, who lived next door.

He would leave me notes when I was little.
Just a sentence.
Just a few words.
Folded in half.

Nothing profound.
Nothing poetic.

Just presence.

Just love, leaving a quiet mark on the day before it began.

I didn’t understand then how rare that kind of love actually is.

The kind that doesn’t perform.
The kind that doesn’t demand applause.
The kind that doesn’t need witnesses.

The kind that simply shows up — again and again — in small, faithful ways.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized something strange and tender.

Those small moments are the ones that stay.

Not the big holidays.
Not the dramatic declarations.
Not the perfectly curated memories.

It’s the mornings.
The routines.
The notes.
The rituals.

It’s the way love lives in the ordinary.

And now, it’s the way love lives in memory.

Because the people who taught me those rituals are no longer here.

My dad.
My mom.
My grandmother.

The women and men who made coffee sacred.
Who made conversation healing.
Who made the table a place of connection instead of chaos.

They are gone now.

But love didn’t leave with them.

It stayed in my body.
In my habits.
In the way I still reach for a cup in the morning and pause, just for a second, before the day begins.

It stayed in the way I still crave slowness.
Still crave ritual.
Still crave something tangible to hold when the world feels loud.

Grief has a strange way of sharpening what matters.

It strips life down to its essentials.

And what remains, almost always, is love — quiet, stubborn, and enduring.

But here is the part I didn’t understand until much later.

I thought I knew what love was.

I didn’t.

Not really.

Not in the way that changes how your body breathes.
Not in the way that softens your nervous system.
Not in the way that makes you feel safe inside your own life.

I didn’t truly understand love until five years ago.

It took a divorce.
A new relationship.
And more therapy than I ever imagined I would need.

It took unlearning the versions of love I had normalized.
It took grieving the tenderness that had been missing for so many years.
It took sitting with the truth that I had lived inside something hollow for a very long time and called it love because I didn’t know there was another way.

And then I learned.

I learned what real love actually feels like in the body.

It is not anxious.
It is not performative.
It is not loud.

It is steady.
It is regulated.
It is kind.
It is slow.

It feels like safety.

It feels like being chosen quietly, again and again.

It feels like a handwritten note on the counter.

That realization broke my heart and healed it at the same time.

Because once you know what real love is, you can’t unknow how much of it was missing before.

And once you know what tenderness feels like, you can’t go back to surviving without it.

That is the love this chapter comes from.

Not nostalgia.

Not fantasy.

Not romance.

But earned tenderness.

Hard-won softness.

The kind of love you have to grow into.

I didn’t start making pottery because I wanted to sell mugs.

I started making pottery because I wanted to hold onto something.

I wanted to make objects that carried memory.
Objects that could anchor a ritual.
Objects that felt like small acts of devotion.

I wanted to make love notes you could hold in your hands.

Something about clay felt like the right language.

It’s slow.
It’s imperfect.
It cracks if you rush it.
It remembers every touch.

Clay doesn’t perform.

It responds.

And in that way, it feels a lot like love.

The first time I painted the word love inside the rim of a mug, I surprised myself by crying.

It felt silly.

It was just a word.

Just four letters.

But it felt like writing a note to someone who wasn’t here anymore.

To my dad.
To my grandmother.
To the version of me who didn’t know yet what real love was supposed to feel like.

A quiet message.
A private reminder.
A small act of continuity.

I started painting flowers next.

Soft ones.
Folk ones.
Imperfect ones.

The kind that feel more like memory than decoration.

The kind that don’t demand attention.

The kind that feel like they belong on a kitchen table where life actually happens.

And suddenly, without meaning to, I had written a chapter in clay.

A story about love that doesn’t fade.
About ritual that doesn’t perform.
About tenderness that survives grief.
About the way we carry people forward in the small, ordinary things we do every day.

This is that chapter.

Love Notes.

It is a story about quiet devotion.
About handwritten rituals.
About slow mornings.
About earned tenderness.
About the love that stays long after people are gone — and long after you finally learn how to receive it.

And from this chapter come a small number of physical artifacts.

Mugs.
Plates.
Dishes.

Objects meant to be used, not displayed.

Objects meant to be held with both hands.

Objects meant to become part of someone’s everyday story.

If you are holding one of these pieces, it means this story found its way into your life.

It means you, too, understand something about quiet love.

About ritual.

About memory.

About becoming.

About the way the smallest things can carry the heaviest meaning.

This is not a seasonal collection.

It is a love note that doesn’t fade.

It is a ritual that stays.

It is a chapter you can hold.

—

Kasey Compton
Kilnfolk
Chapter One: Love Notes

From this chapter comes a small number of physical artifacts — each one a piece of the story made tangible.