✨ This Thanksgiving we celebrate our 8th Birthday. Stay tuned for our biggest sale of the year starting Friday 11/26 with a bonus discount for subscribers to our newsletter 11/27 ✨

So much can happen in just 8 years. 8 years ago, I summoned my extended family to our Thanksgiving table, filled not with a brined and roasted turkey, homemade quince cranberry sauce, buttery mashed potatoes and bacon glazed brussel sprouts...but with cases upon cases of the inaugural Girl Meets Dirt jams - handmade by me, with local fruit handpicked by me, in a borrowed kitchen, with all the love I could muster - with all the love I couldn't expend on a little baby, which I so desperately wanted. This little company that could, was launched in the midst of loss- in between miscarriages number 4 and 5 - in between bouts of grief and intense moments of longing - but after a bountiful fruit season that taught me to have faith in renewal, and rebirth - and to await the blossoms of spring.

Around my Thanksgiving table that year, piled with rolls of our original labels (vintage now!), we made something real together, and gave each other hope (husband, mom, dad, sister, brother, sister-in-law, friends). Jar by jar, each by hand, picking up one single jar, affixing a crooked label, removing a crooked label, trying again with steadier hands, passing them to my mother who ended up being quite adept at affixing a straight label in just the right position, we launched Girl Meets Dirt into the world. It was a small gesture, a small launch, but it meant something big.

Sitting here today, off the rock, in the neighborhood I grew up in, 8 years later, with an almost 7 year old riding his bike with Grandpa, and a 5 year old excited about a trip to Target (island kids); my mother baking pre-made cookies waiting for me to get started on the from-scratch Thanksgiving pies and wondering what cheese to serve with the Cherry Fig Leaf preserves (now, sadly, discontinued) I've brought her (brie, of course) - this business is life as usual around here, in the best of ways. Things change. Sometimes in very big ways. We often don't know why, or how. And yet we can and do adapt. We make do. We love even more deeply. We squeeze harder, lean longer. We give thanks for the things going right. We give thanks to those who've stood by us in the worst of days (label by label), and in the best.

And around here, we'll make cocktails with our shrubs (bourbon is my pick) and dash bitters into bubbly and we eat jam, together. My son, who I doubted would ever come, had it in his yogurt this morning- a recipe I'd made yearning badly for him, spilling love into hot sugar, a copper pot, and hand chopped pears. And now, he has a sister, and we're available across the nation, and I feel like I have no words anymore. And that's a very, very beautiful thing.

This Thanksgiving, we'll mark 8 years of this wild and growing thing that is Girl Meets Dirt - the little jam shop that could - by cracking open our first vintages of wine - to taste as a family - as it should be. We'll toast to good fortune, send gratitude into the world for all our blessings, and manifest the next stop on this train.

May it be sparkling ✨

Happy Thanksgiving.

Cheers, XOXO Audra