Where I Live: The Listener Holiday Special

Speaker 2 Welcome to the Yorang About Holiday Special, the episode where we asked our patrons to send in little audio postcards showing us where you live, what it's like there, what it sounds like, and what people might be getting wrong about the places that you call home.

Speaker 2 I thought of doing this episode because I live in Portland, Oregon, my beautiful hometown, and I got to thinking about how in the news this year, Portland was supposed to be the scary, scary city being taken over by

Speaker 2 non-binary anarchists, I guess.

Speaker 2 And first of all, I wish.

Speaker 2 And second of all, what that kept making me think about was how Portland is, to me, a city where, especially in the fall when a lot of people have more fruit than they can deal with, if you're out for a walk in, I would say most neighborhoods, there's boxes and bags of pears and apples and whatever fruit people want to offer to their neighbors that are just free for the taking.

Speaker 2 And that has a lot more to do with what anarchism is about than any kind of...

Speaker 2 violence that we see in our cities.

Speaker 2 And of course, the idea that Portland is a scary place is one that was used and weaponized this year as an excuse to send dangerous representatives of our federal government into it.

Speaker 2 So we wanted to make a little something to bring a little bit of balance to the way that we are seeing each other and to kind of let us feel part of a bigger community.

Speaker 2 And if there are places in the world or in the United States where we're going to spend most of our time, because that's where most of our voice memos ended up being from, if there are places where you've always wanted to visit or wished that you knew somebody, after listening to this episode, you're going to know somebody there.

Speaker 2 We loved getting to listen to every single submission that people sent in, and we wanted to just share the joy that we felt, both at getting to hear your stories and about your homes, and also just this feeling of being picked up and taken around the world and getting introduced to all these lovely human beings and hearing about the ways that you're finding to care for your communities, keep finding joy.

Speaker 2 If you're a Santa type of person, I certainly am. We want this to feel for you like a ride in Santa's sleigh.
And if not, you can choose whatever magical conveyance you prefer.

Speaker 2 The music you're going to hear in this episode is by Magpie Cinema Club, and Magpie Cinema Club is our producer Miranda Zickler and musician A.J. McKinley.
Now let's climb on board, shall we?

Speaker 4 I'm from Denmark and I'm making this recording from my living room where I'm sitting in me and my partner's old sofa which we got from the Danish equivalent of eBay I guess.

Speaker 4 And I'm here with my old cat who has just been sleeping most of the day away, which I totally get because it's the middle of the day and it's still so dark outside that I have turned on some lights.

Speaker 4 I'm sitting in our pretty old house which we luckily are just renting.

Speaker 4 I mean I don't think we would have the money for buying anything either way but the house is from 1860 so it has all kinds of kinks and quirks.

Speaker 4 I'm sitting in our pretty messy living room. We're just the two of us living together.
So we have hobby things all over the place. Yarn and sewing projects and miniature painting figurines.

Speaker 4 But it's just the two of us, so it's okay.

Speaker 1 And then our cat.

Speaker 4 And we have a crested gecko too. I think we have quite a lot of pets, even for Danish standards.
And today I'm just enjoying staying inside because it's so cold outside.

Speaker 8 Hello, Yorungaba friends.

Speaker 3 I've been a fan of the show for quite a while now and one of the things I really love about it is how much joy that it finds in the mundane and I feel like that kind of sort of like relates to the feelings that I have about the places where I call home.

Speaker 3 So I'm from Greater Manchester in England and that's how that's what they always say when people ask me. I say I'm from Greater Manchester.

Speaker 3 Even though that's not really a town, it's like the whole county which is made up of like a collection of sort of small mining towns but I find it hard to pick any one hometown within this county.

Speaker 3 Each of them feel like home in a different way.

Speaker 3 For example Lee is a place where all the rugby players wear leopard print and it's the place where I learned how to use a bow and arrow which is now a huge part of my life.

Speaker 3 Wigan is the place where everyone loves pies and it's the place where everyone gets into fancy dress on Boxing Day and I actually got my first ever paid writing job going out into the street and interviewing people about why they do this every year.

Speaker 3 Central Manchester is the sort of big central city, and it's the place where I live now. It has these pictures of bees all over the place

Speaker 3 from sort of the city's role in the Industrial Revolution, where a lot of the workers were called referred to as worker bees.

Speaker 3 And it's this weird combination of this really old working-class industrial past with sort of these huge glass buildings now now that sort of the gentrification of it has started but to me it's the place where I learned to pour a pint and it's the place where I really found my voice and actually learned how to talk to other human beings and not be afraid of them.

Speaker 3 Bolton is where my parents live. It's the place where my dogs run out to greet me and where my heart always feels just kind of warm.

Speaker 3 And it's also the birthplace of Philomena Kunk, which is pretty cool too.

Speaker 3 So that's Greater Manchester and each one of these places is home to me in a different way and it's an absolute pleasure to live there.

Speaker 13 Hi, I'm Marbles.

Speaker 13 So I live in a community of about 20 people, also on a trailer park in Germany.

Speaker 13 We are very lucky to have a lot of space and also a lot of dogs. So I try to encapsulate some sounds for you

Speaker 13 for you to better imagine how it is,

Speaker 13 and also to send some good feelings. And I don't know, everything you need.
Maybe it's strength, maybe it's resilience, maybe it's something totally different.

Speaker 13 So, yes, when it gets colder, you hear wood shopping throughout the day.

Speaker 13 So, next to our home, there are train rails, and once

Speaker 13 every every other week or so a very old train passes by

Speaker 13 and this time sadly I didn't get the choo choo but I did get the train passing by.

Speaker 13 Also speaking of choo-choo we have this wonderful habit of when someone has cooked for everyone

Speaker 13 that someone sounds the trumpet. And tonight it sounded like this.

Speaker 13 So with this charming sound and also the fireworks that you might hear in the background

Speaker 13 Yeah, I wish you all a good time and

Speaker 13 again I send you all the good things.

Speaker 13 Yeah thank you for the podcast and I'm really excited to listen to all the other postcards.

Speaker 1 Yeah, bye.

Speaker 4 Hi Sarah, hi everyone in the Jurongabout community.

Speaker 18 I wanted to share with you what it's like standing on our balcony which is in the city of Bonn.

Speaker 18 that was the capital of West Germany until 1990.

Speaker 18 And we actually do have some ring-necked parakeets living here in Bonn and also in other cities along the River Rhine, like Cologne.

Speaker 18 In the 1960s, I guess. They just started spreading.
And I don't know if you know, but usually in Germany we have the usual birds like pigeons or I don't know a crow here and there.

Speaker 18 But yeah, parakeets, that's that's special. And when we moved here into our new flat a year ago, I don't know, it just made the whole thing more special.

Speaker 18 And when I'm having a hard day, which given the situation in a lot of countries, but also in Germany, where everyone's moving to the far right, it feels like, I don't know, when I'm having a hard day for this or that reason, stepping onto the balcony and just watching them and be able to watch them and listen to these unusual...

Speaker 18 habitants of the city. I don't know.
It just puts a smile on my face sometimes. And I appreciate them very much.
And I appreciate you for doing the podcast and everyone listening to it.

Speaker 21 I hope you're all okay.

Speaker 22 This is Fajar.

Speaker 6 It's the early morning

Speaker 23 call to prayer

Speaker 24 happens

Speaker 22 just before the sun comes up.

Speaker 22 Casablanca is

Speaker 23 a noisy city, so this is usually the only time

Speaker 25 I actually hear it.

Speaker 23 It's the rest of the day it's

Speaker 25 delivery, motorcycles all day.

Speaker 27 But yeah, you hear it from all directions, and I'm way up Pai on the fifth floor.

Speaker 23 Hi Sarah, this is Kath and I'm leaving you a message from South Africa.

Speaker 23 It is a warm, overcast, drizzly day in the Eastern Cape in a tiny little town called Hamburg on the coast right down at the bottom of the African continent.

Speaker 26 You can hear the birds.

Speaker 23 You probably can't hear the rain because it's very light, but it is an absolutely beautiful day

Speaker 23 and I hope you can hear what everything sounds like. Contrary to

Speaker 23 what your president, I beg your pardon, not your president,

Speaker 23 has been saying, there is certainly no white genocide going on out here.

Speaker 23 I live in the farmlands and

Speaker 23 it's one of the most beautiful places I've ever lived in my life.

Speaker 23 So sending you love and end of the year wishes from South Africa.

Speaker 23 Hello, world.

Speaker 32 I'm speaking to you from San Juan, Puerto Rico,

Speaker 2 my home.

Speaker 33 It is almost 11 p.m.

Speaker 32 I'm stood outside in my garden.

Speaker 32 And

Speaker 32 I won't bore you with too many details about what's been said about Puerto Rico in the media recently.

Speaker 32 Tonight, I just want to share with you some of the sounds from my garden. I hope you enjoy.

Speaker 32 The shirping sound you're hearing by the way, those are frogs. That is El Coqui.
It is an endemic frog species from Puerto Rico.

Speaker 32 And when you grew up in Puerto Rico, as I did,

Speaker 32 this is your favorite sound in the entire world.

Speaker 32 I could never imagine that there would be someone who did not love this sound as much as we do.

Speaker 32 But

Speaker 32 come to find out, there's some people have been moving to Puerto Rico in the few past years

Speaker 5 that

Speaker 32 don't find this sound pleasant at all

Speaker 32 and

Speaker 32 they want to get rid of El Koki.

Speaker 32 But

Speaker 32 El Koki isn't going anywhere,

Speaker 34 and neither are we.

Speaker 35 Season's greetings from my home in South Florida.

Speaker 35 It is a beautiful afternoon along the ocean. I'm here listening to the waves and appreciating the fact that

Speaker 35 there's a nice cool wind from the cold front that's coming through this evening.

Speaker 35 Florida is walking along the beach and watching Greek blue herons hunt for fish. It's looking for manatees swimming by just past where the waves are breaking.

Speaker 35 It is my morning coffee as I walk my dog, walk to the canal that lines my neighborhood, and try to spot a shark or a ray or a crocodile.

Speaker 35 Florida is the wonderful community of people that I have found.

Speaker 35 Florida is a place that can be really hard to love.

Speaker 35 Florida is a place that is constantly under threat, and yet Florida is a place where there is so much abundance and joy, so much celebration, so much diversity.

Speaker 35 It is a place that makes me feel safe, makes me feel inspired. I really hope that everyone is able to find a place that feels like home in the way that this does for me.

Speaker 34 Hi, Sarah, and all of my other fellow listeners and travelers on this road of life.

Speaker 34 Greetings from Noel in Louisiana.

Speaker 34 I have lived all over the state. Throughout my 40 plus years, my father was a Methodist minister when I was a child, so we kind of went where the church sent him.

Speaker 34 And that was as far north as the rolling red clay hills of La Salle Parish. Lots of tall timber grown up there and harvested and processed at paper mills.

Speaker 34 And as far south as the swampy swamps of, well, as swampy swamp as Slydell or the North Shore get, I guess.

Speaker 34 But the place that I want to tell you about, the place I remember most and consider home the most, are what's known as the Cajun Prairies. And that is in the Avoyal St.

Speaker 34 Andrew Parish area of the state. It is very agrarian.

Speaker 34 And I think of the seasons as harvest seasons. Right now,

Speaker 34 most of the fields are full of or about to be emptied of sugarcane.

Speaker 34 And in November and December, the roads are covered in little bits of sugar cane debris, and no one wants to get behind a cane cane truck. And

Speaker 34 the rice fields are actually crawfish fields now. And you'll see big nets with birds sitting on top trying to steal a little crawfish or two.

Speaker 34 And those will be enjoyed in the spring when the rice is planted again.

Speaker 34 The uncles that live on the road by my mom and my grandmother grew corn and soybeans and wheat and the soybeans were planted in the spring and harvested in the early summer, and the corn was harvested in the late summer, and

Speaker 34 the smell of fermented soybeans that remained, and then

Speaker 34 the

Speaker 34 smell and the sight of the husks of the corn that flew up in the late summer when you hoped for rain to settle it,

Speaker 34 and

Speaker 34 just cycles of life with crops

Speaker 34 and harvest and the gardens that my grandparents kept.

Speaker 34 Those are home to me. And the food, of course, the food.
North Louisiana is not very well seasoned, but oh man, my grandmother could make some rice and gravy.

Speaker 31 Hello, you're wrong about. This is Genevieve.

Speaker 15 Hi, You're Wrong About.

Speaker 24 My name is Grace.

Speaker 40 And I want to tell you about my favorite place on earth. And I've been many, many places, so I feel qualified to say this.

Speaker 15 I've lived here most of my life, moved here when I was four, so I really have very little memories of where I was before.

Speaker 40 And that's Houston, Texas.

Speaker 15 And I live about an hour's drive away from Houston, Texas.

Speaker 40 It's my hometown. It's where I grew up and it's where I came back to as an adult because nowhere else has a soul like Houston does.

Speaker 15 And I would say

Speaker 15 that this state, for all its problems, can be quite beautiful.

Speaker 40 Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the entire country.

Speaker 13 All my life, I

Speaker 15 haven't been able to go very far without hearing Spanish. or Chinese or Vietnamese.

Speaker 40 It's huge and it's sprawling and it's chaotic and it's messy.

Speaker 40 The buildings and the streets are built on top of each other and there are no zoning laws and we're way too invested in highways instead of public transit.

Speaker 15 Where everything is crowded and the traffic is endless.

Speaker 40 But it is also beautiful and authentic and resilient.

Speaker 15 The people, the culture, the food, it's all so bright, so

Speaker 15 life-giving.

Speaker 40 One of my favorite things to do is to take my dog, Penny, from parks throughout the city for our evening walks. Because no matter where we go, somebody is playing baseball or soccer.

Speaker 40 People are having picnics in the grass and playing fetch with their dogs. Couples are walking along the trails and the paths.
Kids are learning how to ride bikes.

Speaker 40 And it's just so human and it's so beautiful.

Speaker 15 And in the spring, the blue bonnets bloom for all of two weeks, and everyone rushes to take pictures of them. Pictures of themselves, pictures of their pets, pictures of their children.

Speaker 40 And every time that I have felt really ground down in the last year because of the state of things, all it takes is one trip to a neighborhood park to remember that we're still here and there's still joy here and there's beauty here too.

Speaker 40 I think people get the wrong idea of Texas because the only things they hear are the things that the people in power here want them to know.

Speaker 40 But the truth is, for the last three decades, a handful of really wealthy people who want the state to look like their own personal Christian nationalist views have funded a very effective campaign to make sure the only people who win elections think like them.

Speaker 40 So the people of Texas don't really have any representation at the top of our state. And what you see is what those people want and not who we are.
I love Texas. I love Houston.

Speaker 15 And I will always love this crazy place.

Speaker 40 I think we're worth fighting for.

Speaker 37 This is Kara from Nashville, Tennessee. I actually live south of Nashville in a place called Williamson County, which is the richest county.
in Tennessee.

Speaker 37 And of course, that means the most Republican, the most MAGA.

Speaker 37 But I persist nevertheless And

Speaker 37 one of the things I've been doing this year is

Speaker 37 I wear a lot of gay shit. I have a lot of

Speaker 37 gay t-shirts. I have rainbow sweaters.
I have rainbow sneakers.

Speaker 37 I have tons of little rainbow bracelets. And whenever I'm out and about here in Williamson County running errands or whatever, I wear

Speaker 37 at least one gay item partially just because I'm very proud of the fact that I figured out that I'm bisexual or pansexual late in life.

Speaker 37 And

Speaker 37 also

Speaker 37 because I'm of a certain age and I really don't give a shit anymore.

Speaker 37 So I really would love for that old man staring at me and like being really mad at me for wearing a t-shirt that says lesbian on it in Walmart. I want him to make a fuss because I would love

Speaker 37 to talk back to him because I don't care anymore.

Speaker 37 It's the blessing of not having any fucks. And I try my best to be be a loud, visibly queer person

Speaker 37 to give cover to those folks who are less comfortable being out and proud and are afraid right now because I know they have good reason to be afraid.

Speaker 37 So I'm just as loud and obnoxious and as gay as I possibly can be.

Speaker 37 And one of the best things is when I go out and about,

Speaker 37 people all the time say, I love your rainbow sweater. I love that shirt.
That's such a great message because I really do believe there are more of us than there are of them.

Speaker 37 And most people just want everybody to be able to pursue what they want and be left alone and live their lives. So I hold on to that and I hold on to the birds.

Speaker 37 I come outside almost every morning and listen to the birds. I have a bird feeder, I have a bird tracker app, so I guess I'm a birder now.

Speaker 37 And let's listen to this morning: we have robins, we have cardinals, we have starlings, and um sparrows. So let's listen to these little birds just be happy I refilled the bird feeder.

Speaker 44 My name is Hannah. I'm currently in Oakland, California, but I want to talk about my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee.

Speaker 45 There are so many things I love about Memphis.

Speaker 45 Getting chills in the AC in the summer and stepping outside, feeling the weight of the humid air, hearing cicadas, drinking honeysuckle nectar in the backyard with my sister, sister, and last winter going to the stacked recording studio with my dad and listening to Otis Redding sing about sitting by the dock of the bay.

Speaker 45 I grew up in Memphis until college, leaving as my relationship with home was becoming complicated.

Speaker 45 I'm now a nurse at New Reductive Health, but when I was a teenager, I'd only just started to notice the way adults treated my sexuality. A need of rigid control, yet also somehow not existing.

Speaker 45 I couldn't articulate that tension then, let alone my queerness. As so many teenage girls are, I was just angry all the time.

Speaker 45 I first got involved with abortion organizing on the state level, but the defeats were devastating and the anger felt so much more personal to me than to our opposition.

Speaker 45 I went to Atlanta for college, which felt impossibly cosmopolitan. For the first time, my interests were welcomed and my anger made me determined.

Speaker 45 I found queer family that made it harder to visit home where my parents were navigating a painful divorce.

Speaker 45 I looked to my graduation in 2020 with excitement for independence in Georgia and being more openly queer. But it didn't happen that way.
I had to move back to Memphis Memphis with a day's notice.

Speaker 45 My plans changed. A breakup, a nannying job, graduation on Facebook Live.
The grief, I made the best of it by moving out of my dad's house and into a studio in the Cooper Young neighborhood.

Speaker 45 I went on long walks in a city that I hadn't known as an adult, wondering if I'd ever feel the sense of belonging I'd lost.

Speaker 45 As travel became possible again, I visited a friend in San Francisco and went into a queer history museum in the Castro.

Speaker 45 I cried reading about the local activism that had happened there, not only because it had happened, but the reverence with which it was being spoken about.

Speaker 45 Bogged down by resisting the conservative bent of my nursing program, I could barely imagine something like this in Memphis.

Speaker 45 I started working in birth and abortion, came out, moved back to Atlanta, then to Oakland.

Speaker 45 I returned to Memphis last summer and was driving past the science and history museum known locally as the Pink Palace, a mansion surrendered to the city when the founder of Piggly Wiggly went bankrupt.

Speaker 45 When I saw a sign for a Pride Month exhibit, I stepped into a museum I'd last been to as a kid. I recognized names and places from my childhood in a new light.

Speaker 45 I saw photos photos of a lesbian bookstore that had been just blocks from my studio until it closed in the 90s, a building I'd walked past dozens of times.

Speaker 45 To white conservatives, Memphis is nothing more than a place to project racist moral panics about crime onto.

Speaker 45 To many coastal liberals, like in California here, it's backwards, an unsafe space, a place to pity.

Speaker 45 But this is what I want to hold as home in Memphis, that we have always been inventing and reinventing new worlds for taking care of each other. We just have to notice.

Speaker 10 I live in the highly desirable, rapidly gentrifying oasis of purple and a deeply red state, Charleston, South Carolina.

Speaker 10 We are a destination for problematic plantation weddings and roving troves of bachelorette parties. Everyone wants to move here and seemingly has since remote work became accessible post-2020.

Speaker 10 We have everything: hurricanes, flooding, so much flooding, traffic made worse by non-existent infrastructure, Racist senators and corrupt politicians. Amazing food.

Speaker 10 Beaches and Spanish moss-covered live oak trees. Google's strand-feeding dolphins.
Charleston is a drinking town with a historic problem. Mosquitoes were invented here.
I love it.

Speaker 10 I moved to Charleston about 13 years ago from another series of southern towns, so I knew what I was getting into for the most part. But let's go back to the gentrification.

Speaker 10 The thing that people love most about my My Fair Town, the charm, the small retailers, the local cuisine, the locals, are being pushed out by big bad developers and the Condé Nast adherents.

Speaker 10 Charleston is becoming less and less Charleston every day.

Speaker 10 And it's not because of the new people coming in, but because of the lack of incentives and programming in place to keep current businesses and residents to stay.

Speaker 10 Jordan Amaker from Low Country Local First says gentrification is a policy failure. Losing character is a failure of design.
Losing demographics is a failure of policy.

Speaker 10 Community growth is a garden we must tend. So come and visit us.
Come move here with me and my Johns Island native husband. But shop local, shop small, and buy from local businesses.

Speaker 10 Not just this holiday, but all year.

Speaker 11 This is my audio postcard from my backyard in Charleston, South Carolina. I grew up here anxious and a closeted queer kid who felt so alone.

Speaker 11 I sought refuge online on my One Direction Tumblr, making friends only with my mutuals. I swore I was going to get out of this town as soon as I could and never look back.

Speaker 11 The appeal Charleston had to tourists and forever locals was confusing to me when I was younger.

Speaker 6 The beauty here is abundant and everywhere.

Speaker 11 In the wetlands and in the people, it all just felt obvious and surface level and I was completely bored by it.

Speaker 11 I had a couple pretty traumatic events happen in my late teens and early 20s and I was extremely lost when I started acting out so I blamed the city.

Speaker 11 I moved to New York City at 23 and was taught new ideals that the South shielded me from. I came out and I realized I'm beautiful too even though I'm not a Charleston 10.

Speaker 11 In 2023 I had some mental health issues pop up and I knew I needed to be back in the low country.

Speaker 11 When I moved back I made a big effort to be uncomfortable and search for connection with my newfound identity and firm beliefs.

Speaker 11 I feel I found community and friendship that I never have before within the arts. All of my friends are so incredibly talented and make me feel driven to to create and be better.

Speaker 11 I also reached out to my childhood best friend and rekindled our friendship. Though we couldn't be more indifferent, she shows me to slow down and enjoy life.

Speaker 11 When I think about playing mermaids at Folly Beach or doing a puzzle, I think about her and her sons and the lasting impacts they've made on me.

Speaker 11 The jaded view I used to have of this city and the landscape is all gone now because of the friends who reintroduced me to its beauty. Now when I look at the wetlands, I don't look past them.

Speaker 11 I look at them with awe, like at how my friend Esther showed me too.

Speaker 11 When I think of my best best friend Aurora, I think of shaking ass on a Friday night at Recovery Room Tavern with a PBR in hand, peanut butter waffles and black coffee at Waffle House, and chain smoking cigarettes while dolphin watching at Sunrise Park.

Speaker 11 Things I used to think were boring now are precious. I overheard a conversation once about some people moving away and then coming home.

Speaker 11 And then the girl said, look around, we all end up back in Charleston. Those words used to feel like a death sentence, but now feel comforting.

Speaker 11 If you ever move here or you live here now and are struggling to make friends, it's a magical place full of important history, beautiful ecosystems, and wildlife, and in hidden pockets are some of the most kind-hearted and genuine people.

Speaker 11 You just have to be willing to search for them.

Speaker 24 Hi, Sarah, and you're wrong about listeners. My name's Irena, and I'm calling you from beautiful Richmond, Virginia.

Speaker 24 I wanted to talk about the thing that has kept me going, not just in the last year, but for the last five plus years,

Speaker 24 which is my local mutual aid network. It's called Mad RVA Mutual Aid Distribution Richmond.

Speaker 24 We, in the first few weeks of the COVID pandemic, got together a bunch of folks to distribute food to people who couldn't leave their homes. We crowdfunded.

Speaker 24 We got amazing produce donations from home gardeners and from local farms. We did that through 2021.

Speaker 24 And then in 2023, we opened a free grocery store called the Meadowbridge Community Market in a neighborhood called Northside, which lives under food apartheid.

Speaker 24 And since April of 2023, so going on almost three years, we have been providing groceries and hygiene supplies and mental supplies and COVID tests and baby supplies to about 200 families every week.

Speaker 24 And we are trying to buy the building that this store operates out of so we can permanently commit to this neighborhood, this community, and making sure that people have the food that they need.

Speaker 24 Giving food to people for free is a political act.

Speaker 24 Just because SNAP is back doesn't mean that there are not millions of families not getting enough food, not getting good, nutritious food, not getting treats.

Speaker 24 We also have treats because everyone deserves that. And we're going to keep doing this for as long as we possibly can.

Speaker 24 We operate in an amazing network of other mutual aid orgs like our community fridges, Sylvia Sisters, that gives us menstrual products, Little Hands, that gets us baby products, the Richmond Reproductive Freedom Project, which is an abortion fund.

Speaker 24 And we all operate together to try to make Richmond a better, more equitable place for everyone.

Speaker 25 My name is Elizabeth, and I live in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 47 And

Speaker 48 this is not a postcard about the National Guard or the number of active police forces in the city, which is preposterous, or the absolute scourge upon the earth that are Republican lawmakers from other states that come to our city to just talk shit about us and try to overrule local government.

Speaker 50 This is about Club Bannaker.

Speaker 41 One of the best things about living in DC.

Speaker 41 Bannaker is the public pool in my neighborhood.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 49 on the weekends in the summer, the DJ,

Speaker 49 who is really the head lifeguard, plays bumpin music

Speaker 49 to wall-to-wall people, and it's an incredible experience.

Speaker 41 I love DC and I knew it was home about two weeks after I got off the plane from the middle of the country.

Speaker 48 And I hope that everyone finds a home the way that I did when I came here.

Speaker 51 My name is Jillian, and I currently live in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 51 For me, it's especially insane to have to continually remind myself that none of this is normal because for someone with my privileges, the rate at which it became normal was a lot faster than I thought it would be.

Speaker 51 So I love DC.

Speaker 51 And I also just wanted to shout out two people that have made this place home. There are a lot of fantastic people here who I love.

Speaker 51 But my roommates, Corinne and Eve, we've been through so much together. We've seen each other through bad dates and sick cats.
And of course,

Speaker 51 the continual downfall of our democracy as we know it. They made me pancakes on my first day of grad school and give me ibuprofen when I'm too lazy to buy my own.

Speaker 51 And at a point in our lives where we're seeing a lot of emphasis put on starting a family and finding romantic love and all the other fun heteronormative stuff, I'm really, really proud of the platonic family and the home I've already built for myself with these two incredible women.

Speaker 51 And, you know, as I leave to start a new chapter of my life, and I'm a little bit worried about moving back to where I grew up.

Speaker 51 I'm really comforted because I know that no matter where I am, as long as they're in this city, I'll find a part of home here.

Speaker 43 Hello, I am sitting here on the first really sleety, rainy, cold, dark day of winter on my couch, cuddled up with the world's snuggliest French bulldog making lots of snore noises as I sip a really nice coffee.

Speaker 43 But I think what's remarkable about where I am is that I'm in a place that is truly safe and beautiful.

Speaker 43 But much like Portland, it's a place that many people want you to think is ugly and dangerous, and that is Washington, D.C.

Speaker 43 Specifically, I live on Capitol Hill with the aforementioned bulldog.

Speaker 43 And it's been a really difficult several months for our city. We are having neighbors snatched by ICE, and secret police roaming our streets and National Guardsmen on our streets.

Speaker 43 And it's challenging to live with the duality of it.

Speaker 43 But there are people living full lives with beautiful families and communities and neighborhoods that deserve the chance to have that without the federal intervention we've seen, without the cruelty we've seen, without the pain and hurt that we have seen inflicted.

Speaker 43 on our city.

Speaker 43 But underneath it all, I think it's the beauty that helps us thrive and survive. And I certainly think that that's the case for me and for my bulldog as he begins to snore a little bit more.

Speaker 43 So thank you for this chance to share my coffee with you this morning and to share our city with you, which already belongs to all of you.

Speaker 36 I saw a TikTok yesterday where there was a man with City Hall in the background, and he said to the camera that I am from the city, state, and country of Philadelphia.

Speaker 54 And I laughed because that's how it feels here.

Speaker 36 There's not quite another place like this.

Speaker 53 You can say go birds to mean anything you want.

Speaker 36 It depends on your inflection, I guess. You can say fuck around and find out because it's true.
Fuck around and find out is so important, I think.

Speaker 36 I think that we can all let things be because when you fuck around, you're going to find out.

Speaker 50 Anyways,

Speaker 36 I am a country transplant. I'm not actually from here.
I'm from the middle of nowhere. When I first came to Philly, I felt a sense of that last puzzle piece clicking in.

Speaker 36 I came over a ridge on Route 3, coming towards Philadelphia early in the morning as the sun was rising and going directly into my eyes.

Speaker 36 And I saw the city skyline breaking up the rising sun and just something in me really realized that, oh no, this is where I'm supposed to be. Fast forward, and we have a home.

Speaker 34 We have some cats.

Speaker 36 I have a husband that I met here. I have a baby that I birthed here.

Speaker 36 And I remember when I was pregnant being sad that my daughter wouldn't get the same upbringing as me.

Speaker 36 But then I remember to myself as I thought about it for longer that I liked it, but I didn't love it.

Speaker 36 And maybe she'll feel the same way about living here.

Speaker 36 Maybe she'll want to go back to the country that I'm from, the countryside, I should say, that I'm from in central Pennsylvania, but she might also love it.

Speaker 36 She might not have to look for that missing puzzle piece like I did.

Speaker 27 My name is Virginia, and not sure if this counts, but I wanted to talk about a city that I don't currently live in, but I'm in the process of moving to just toward another apartment today.

Speaker 27 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a city of brotherly love and Sylvester Stallone.

Speaker 27 I

Speaker 27 just graduated from college this past May, and during my senior year, I just wanted to figure out where I wanted to land.

Speaker 27 It's hard to define where you want to be until you're there and you just feel that connection.

Speaker 27 A lot like falling in love in a lot of ways. But I visited Philly for the first time this January on New Year's Day.
And I just, I fell in love with it.

Speaker 27 I fell in love with the people, the history, all of the art.

Speaker 27 And

Speaker 27 when I went to one of the coffee shops, I just started a conversation with a stranger. And she told me that she loves Philadelphia and she moved back here after living in Montreal and Boston.
Because

Speaker 27 the people just have this attitude of if there's something that you see about the city that you don't like, then, you know, come help.

Speaker 27 That just reminded me a lot about what you and Harmony Colangelo have discussed multiple times about, you know, loving a city despite its flaws and seeing what it could be and wanting to work towards that.

Speaker 27 And I'm just really so excited for this next step. It's really scary, like incredibly scary in a lot of ways.

Speaker 27 But I'm just really excited to, you know, get my hands dirty and learn more about the city and start contributing to it.

Speaker 56 I am from tire swings and tulip trees and fallen walnuts and play pretend pasta. I am from Sandy Run Creek, both deadly rushing water and expressway to the park.

Speaker 56 I am from brick walkways leading to brick houses, built in part by my own two hands and in whole by the two hands that built me. I am from cousins as siblings, siblings as role models in safety nets.

Speaker 56 I am from honoring those who have passed, from your grandmother would have loved you, and Casey, watch over your sisters.

Speaker 56 From my mom's mom's recipes, simplified and discounted, and anglicized Italian slang.

Speaker 56 From Pink Floyd and Bon Jovi, WMMR and WMGK, cranked loud enough to hear over the Jeep's busted transmission and the turnpike wind rustling our hair.

Speaker 56 I am from nothing secret, nothing sacred, from dog hair on the couch and cement in the dryer, all else a guise of pristine.

Speaker 57 There is no state in the United States that people get more wrong about than New Jersey. I should know because I'm from here, lived here all my life.

Speaker 57 You can do an entire web series on just one region of New Jersey and still have enough left over for a side podcast.

Speaker 57 See, the first misconception is that New Jersey is just one state when it is, in fact, three.

Speaker 57 There is North Jersey, heavily influenced by New York City, that is full of both hill people and city people.

Speaker 57 There is South Jersey, heavily influenced by Philadelphia, which is full of pine barren people and beach people.

Speaker 57 And then there's Central Jersey, where I'm from, that both people from North Jersey and South Jersey agree doesn't exist.

Speaker 57 But we do in fact exist. That's something that people in New Jersey get wrong about New Jersey all the time.
Central Jersey does, in fact, exist.

Speaker 57 And there are many such arguments that go on within the borders of this state that make no sense to anyone else.

Speaker 57 I don't blame people for leaving New Jersey. New Jersey is

Speaker 57 taxing emotionally, it's taxing physically, and most importantly, it's taxing financially. It's really hard to live and exist here.

Speaker 57 But if you do, if you come from here, there is nothing that can surprise you, and there's nothing that can take you down.

Speaker 57 And that's the one thing

Speaker 57 everyone gets wrong about New Jersey

Speaker 57 Underestimating us.

Speaker 55 Greetings from the sweet rural sprawl of Jerseylania.

Speaker 55 That's the intersection of western New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, a blend of Warren and Hunterdon counties, New Jersey, and Lehigh, Northampton, and Bucks counties, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 55 Here's a place where you can have some of the weirdest dreams in the country.

Speaker 55 It's mighty haunted in these woods, and the spirit folk just might cross the astral thresholds into your subconscious to have a chat.

Speaker 55 Of course, you can also enjoy yourself with the local teenagers, drinking and smoking weed in the graveyard.

Speaker 55 This is simultaneously one of the most boring places to grow up and rich with abandoned buildings, places with much scope for the imagination, and cryptids.

Speaker 55 You need a car to get anywhere, and that car will be filled with grungy, self-described goat girls that just swam in the Raritan or Delaware rivers. Housing is unaffordable.

Speaker 55 Good old boys drive trucks waving Confederate flags. But the land is sacred and held dear by all the weird, witchy, queer punk kids and their cats who came here by accident of birth.

Speaker 55 It ain't much, but it's home.

Speaker 58 Hello, team at your wrongabout. My name is Chris.
I'm a tour guide in New York City, and I am reporting to you live from

Speaker 58 Rockefeller Center the weekend before Thanksgiving. The quiet before the storm because the population of our city is about to double over the next six weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's.

Speaker 58 Just looking to see if things are on track. We have people ice skating.
Check. The Rockettes are never further away from 90 minutes from performing the parade with soldiers.

Speaker 58 We got a giant tree going up in the middle of Rockefeller Center.

Speaker 58 We've got the Christmas decorations going up over at Sac's Fifth Avenue. So everything seems like it is on time and on schedule for Santa Claus's arrival down 6th Avenue here in a couple of days.

Speaker 58 But through the magic of audio storytelling, we're going to go up closer to where I actually live.

Speaker 10 This is 158th Street bound C local train.

Speaker 14 The next stop is 72nd Street.

Speaker 8 Stand clear of the closing door, please.

Speaker 58 And just like that,

Speaker 58 we are in Central Park

Speaker 58 by the pond bordering the North Woods.

Speaker 58 And I'm heading deeper in to meet a friend who lives on the other side of the park from me. And

Speaker 58 I think that is

Speaker 58 what

Speaker 58 the holidays are like

Speaker 58 for so many New Yorkers. It is

Speaker 58 the glitz and the glam

Speaker 58 of New York at Christmas

Speaker 58 and just doing our best to kind of sneak away

Speaker 58 and be with the ones we care with and find those

Speaker 42 private, warm, real,

Speaker 58 intimate moments.

Speaker 28 My name is Amy, and I live in Western Massachusetts. I have four pear trees in my yard.

Speaker 28 So when you talked about people in Portland giving away fruit from their trees, it made me think of my pears and how I share them with my family and my neighbors here in little western Massachusetts.

Speaker 28 I'm very involved in my library. I'm very involved in my local church here.

Speaker 28 And we spend a lot of time giving things away to our neighbors.

Speaker 28 And for me, that's what's helped me stay hopeful. My children also live in my small house with me.
My son is just graduating from college, and my daughter is seven.

Speaker 28 And we are all saying to each other, how can we help?

Speaker 9 How can we make this little corner of the world that we live in a more peaceful place?

Speaker 60 Hi, my name is Lucille. I live in Hyannis, Massachusetts on Kip Cod.

Speaker 60 And this is a piece I wrote a little while ago. Everyone wants to visit in the summer.
It's all about the beaches. In July, the beach almost isn't even necessary.

Speaker 60 Just walking around feels like swimming. The water is 75% poison anyway.
In summer, it's all a parking lot.

Speaker 60 Cars don't move, and if they do, they're cutting you off only to go five miles under the limit. Pavement is hot and squishy and the only smell in the air.

Speaker 60 In fall, the roads are smooth and cool and crunchy with leaves. My mother says hello to the workers who have been repaving them for the last three years.

Speaker 60 She fills out hand warmers that had been turning fuzzy with life in our damp basement. The air cools with the dissipation of red, sweaty bodies.

Speaker 60 The ocean goes green and barren, and the rocky beaches are barable again. It's not just that they're empty.
The sand is soft and damp and cool. The lifeguard stands are abandoned.

Speaker 60 Stones clink against each other and dance in the tide. Fog settles in, like the crush on the boy who sits two desks over in algebra.

Speaker 60 It wraps everyone in a comfortable haze of mile-long scroll pickup lines and gray. You can almost see how it used to be a small fishing town before all the chemically induced lawns and tourist traps.

Speaker 60 On the highways, there are these signs pointing to the bridge in case of tsunami. It implies we'll have some sort of warning when it comes, though.

Speaker 60 I've never understood tsunamis to call ahead of time to make a reservation. My mother says that if there's ever a tsunami, she would just let it suck her up.

Speaker 60 There's always too much bridge traffic in the summer. I tell her she should move.
I've heard it called the vortex, as in, you never get out. Maybe you think you've gotten out.

Speaker 60 You got past the bridge traffic anyway, but you'll be back. Back to the beaches you never go to, back to the highways and the pavement, back to the poisoned water, our owned oncology department.

Speaker 60 Tourists, tourists, tourists, or us trapped in paradise. A business lookers out.
The building sits dusty. Maybe it will be a hotel someday or another bank.

Speaker 60 My dad thinks I should write newsletters for the museum, that I should start a blog about whaling, that he's going to sell the house and move south.

Speaker 60 My mother tells me she will move in with me some day, that I should come home for the summer, that's sure to help. That she wonders if she will miss the beach.

Speaker 60 I drive home from work past midnight, stuck in traffic and traffic and traffic. This is the light where everyone races you to get across the intersection first.

Speaker 60 This is the road I would turn off when I finally learned how to drive so I could throw away the lunch I never ate.

Speaker 60 This is the long way home my dad would take if he needed to talk to me about saying hello to his girlfriend with incorrect inflection, or reading my book on the sofa.

Speaker 60 A car drives by and revs its engine every hour on the hour, marking the passage of morning, afternoon, night, morning. Everyone from high school is here.
We pretend not to see each other.

Speaker 14 I'm calling in from

Speaker 14 just outside of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Canada.

Speaker 61 I hope you can hear the wind.

Speaker 17 It's very gray.

Speaker 14 It will be gray here until probably

Speaker 14 mid-April. Gray skies, grey snow,

Speaker 14 gray mud, gray ice, but like a lot of things that exist in the gray area,

Speaker 14 like me actually,

Speaker 14 I'm trying to learn how to love it.

Speaker 61 Hi, my name is Emily. I'm writing in from Tuckeronto, also known as Toronto or Toronto if you're from here in Canada.
Takoronto is a Mohawk word, which means where there are trees in the water.

Speaker 61 I bring that up because for me, when I think about what makes Toronto Toronto, it's the waters.

Speaker 61 We are fed by three rivers that all join Lake Ontario at the south end of the city, and I'm sitting by the shores of Lake Ontario right now at the ferry docks. It's late November, so it's cold.

Speaker 61 It's about two degrees, and it's snowing a bit today.

Speaker 61 The water looks pretty uninviting, unless you're a duck, but being by this lake through all four seasons is one of the things that I love the most about Toronto.

Speaker 61 In the depths of winter, the shallow parts of the lake sometimes freeze over so much that people can actually skate on them over to the islands that are a couple of kilometers off the shore.

Speaker 61 Granted, that's happening less and less now due to climate change, but it's still pretty cool to see when it does happen.

Speaker 61 Now this whole area that I'm in, the harbor front, is quiet today, but whenever I'm here, I think about what it's like in the summer.

Speaker 61 Because there's an art center down here, tons of ice cream stalls, and of course, the ferries that bring people back and forth between the mainland and the islands.

Speaker 61 They're not very busy today, but on summer Saturdays, they're bringing hundreds of people over to the Toronto Islands. Toronto is one of the most diverse cities on earth.

Speaker 61 Over half of us who live here were born outside of Canada. So, on the ferry, you always hear families chatting away in English, French, and Tagalog, and Arabic, and Amharic, and

Speaker 61 Cantonese, Portuguese, Hindi, like all people with very different lives, but all just sharing this experience of, you know, covering the kids in sunscreen, packing a picnic, and heading out of the downtown for a day at the beach.

Speaker 61 And it always moves me to be on that ferry because it really feels like it is for all of us. And Toronto has always seemed to me like a place where

Speaker 61 most people really love and value our diversity and welcome newcomers.

Speaker 61 But these days, I think there's a lot of fear and pressure, and people looking around and seeing that things seem to be getting worse, not better, and they want to know why.

Speaker 61 And I'm scared that there are these narratives that originate here, but also elsewhere,

Speaker 61 which are slowly chipping away at that lovely consensus that this place is for all of us. So, my hope for 2026 and beyond is simply that we never let them.

Speaker 42 Hi, Sarah. Like you, I live in a maligned place in America.

Speaker 42 I live in Springfield, Ohio, which gained some notoriety during the last presidential election cycle when Donald Trump said that our Haitian immigrants are eating the dogs, they're eating the cats.

Speaker 42 That is not happening here, by the way. But Springfield is a town that suffered a lot in the recession, but

Speaker 42 there is a lot of hope here. I volunteer with a non-profit that tutors people in reading and writing and

Speaker 42 basic literacy skills. From that angle, I just get to see so many people who are doing so much good in the community and who want to help.

Speaker 42 And I also wanted to share one of my favorite moments of connection with our Haitian immigrants.

Speaker 42 I had been doing some Haitian Creole on Duolingo, and I was at Meier one day, and a Haitian woman carrying a big squash saw me using the produce

Speaker 42 scales, asked me how to do that, and I showed her, and she said, thank you. And I said, pad croa, which is you're welcome in Creole.
And the way she lit up, it just made my day.

Speaker 42 And I just wish that we as a country could all do more to live for those moments, because to me, that is the heart of what this country really is.

Speaker 12 I grew up in a town called Midland, Michigan, which is in its own way, kind of a hallmark Christmas town.

Speaker 12 And what I mean by that is every year, there is a big Santa parade where Santa comes down from the North Pole across the Tridge, which is a bridge downtown that goes from nowhere to nowhere to nowhere, and arrives at the courthouse where they light up the baby Jesus in the manger on the courthouse lawn.

Speaker 12 But really what's most fascinating about my hometown is at a point in, I want to say the early 90s when I was maybe 11, they built a Santa house that has now become kind of world famous.

Speaker 12 But more importantly, the Santa house actually has a Santa school and people come from all over the world to go to this Santa school.

Speaker 12 And so now as an adult, you know, they had little bits on the travel channel with my favorite librarian from childhood teaching storytelling to Santa's. And that's, I think, really special.

Speaker 12 It's weird, and I didn't think it was weird growing up. I thought it was just like

Speaker 12 Everybody has a manger at the courthouse, and everybody has a Santa come down across their weird little footbridge.

Speaker 12 I think it was a really magical time for me, and now Christmas is always magical because of this lovely Santa house that I grew up with.

Speaker 12 And I actually have a Santa house ornament that still lives on my Christmas tree, even though I've moved away to warmer climates. And that's my story about my home.
Thank you for listening.

Speaker 6 Hey, Sarah, I'm calling from snowy Chicago.

Speaker 46 And something I love about this place is that conformity isn't as much of a social value here as it has been other places I've lived.

Speaker 46 I think it's because a lot of people moved here as adults and had to make all new friends and so had to be more open than they would have otherwise.

Speaker 46 My fiancé and I have become pretty close friends with a refugee family from South America and they needed a safe and affordable place to live.

Speaker 29 They were kind of out of options.

Speaker 26 So we decided to

Speaker 46 shop for houses that would be big enough for us to share.

Speaker 46 We found one and something that was so cool is that we were open about why we wanted this house and all the people that were going to live here

Speaker 46 and everyone in the process was enthusiastic to help us. The seller was excited the real estate agent the lender were calling me and talking to me about logistics,

Speaker 46 seeing if they could do it in their own lives. My parents and neighbors helped.

Speaker 46 And my coworkers check in every couple months and say, can I send them some money? How's their asylum case proceeding? So it's been really awesome to see how much warmth and respect there is.

Speaker 31 And when you give people opportunities to show up, they do.

Speaker 12 My name is Dina, and I live in Chicago in the Edgewater neighborhood. It's Thanksgiving.

Speaker 12 In about an hour, I'm going to ride my bike from Edgewater to my husband's brother's, wife's brother's house in Humboldt Park.

Speaker 12 These are both pretty immigrant neighborhoods, and so both of these neighborhoods were hit really hard by the ICE siege. that has recently eased off but is not over.

Speaker 12 And that has been really horrible. But one thing that has been great about it is seeing the community response that popped up to deal with this issue.

Speaker 12 Just about everyone I know is on some sort of signal thread about doing bike patrols in their neighborhood or helping out, you know, making sure kids get home safe from school.

Speaker 12 And I might send you another voice memo from my ride so that you can get some of the like sound terroir. I don't know what the right word for that is.

Speaker 12 If you listen really closely right now, you can hear the metra going by maybe.

Speaker 12 Thanks for asking this question. I really love where I live.
I think most Chicagoans do.

Speaker 12 And the things about that city that make it into the popular consciousness are often, you know, really distorted for reasons that suck.

Speaker 62 Okay, here is the sound of me riding down Kenzie Avenue with a pannier full of local beer and my dear old Wisconsin grandpa's favorite holiday appetizer, which is Fritos and Egg Salad.

Speaker 62 It's 3.06, it's already getting dark and it's snowing just a little bit.

Speaker 50 Hello, my name is Bianca Alba. I am a journalist and content creator who makes a lot of videos about Chicago, where I live, a city that's recently been under a lot of government scrutiny.

Speaker 50 And I wanted to talk about the holiday train and bus, which is one of the favorite things that happens in Chicago this time of year.

Speaker 50 And I want you to imagine that you're working in an office downtown and you've gotten a very exhausting commute home.

Speaker 50 And you go into the elevated train station and you're waiting for your train home, and all of a sudden it pulls up covered in candy canes and Christmas lights. lights.

Speaker 50 There's an actual Santa sleigh between the train cars, and then you get in, and there's attendants dressed like elves who will hand you candy.

Speaker 50 Jose Feliciano's Felice Navidad is playing on the speaker system.

Speaker 50 The train seats are upholstered in a snowman pattern, and instead of the usual print advertisements on the walls of the train, there's advertisements for fake businesses in the North Pole, and everything is just like cheery and bright and ridiculous.

Speaker 50 It is so good. They will paint the bus to look like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
It's unhinged. I don't even like Christmas, and I'm obsessed with it.

Speaker 50 And I always tell people, take the Santa train or the holiday bus, and it'll just completely turn your day around and make you feel like a kid again.

Speaker 50 That's my testimony about what it's actually like to live in Chicago and how truly magical it can be to be here even in the darkest time of year.

Speaker 21 Hello, you're wrong about makers and listeners. I am calling from Duluth, Minnesota, which is in northern Minnesota.
It's right where Lake Superior meets the St. Louis River.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 21 I am calling to spread some love about the winter. I have this theory that there's something about it being so cold here that enables care and connection.

Speaker 21 And I think it has something to do with the fact that if it's really cold out and you like pass somebody whose car has given out, you gotta stop because if you don't, that person could be toast in like 10 minutes.

Speaker 21 I'd be curious to hear if people think that that's a Midwestern thing or a cold climate thing or a Minnesotan thing. But yeah, that's Duluth.

Speaker 21 It's a weird place and it's a complicated place, but it's definitely beautiful and

Speaker 21 that beauty cannot be separated from the winter.

Speaker 30 Hi, my name is Jack. I'm originally from Omaha, Nebraska.
And when I went to college, when I moved out of Omaha, I found it very strange because I love Omaha. And I've always been very proud of Omaha.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 it was a little shocking to me when people, when I would tell them I'm from Omaha, does not resonate the same with people who don't come from Omaha.

Speaker 30 You know, I would get responses: oh, it's a small little town in Nebraska. It's, I don't know where that is.
You know,

Speaker 30 I've always been proud of Omaha, and I don't think it gets the credit it deserves. But when I was in college, I, for a random class, I wrote this little poem, and so I wanted to share that.

Speaker 30 It went something like this:

Speaker 30 I'm from a place called Omaha, 500,000 people small. It's not well known, but even so, it will always be my home.
That's all.

Speaker 17 My name is Morgan. I live in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I've lived in Nebraska almost my entire life.

Speaker 17 My parents are conventional farmers of corn and soybeans, and I grew up thinking that Nebraska was a pretty boring place to be. I thought that stories happened elsewhere.

Speaker 17 I, in college, worked at an agricultural institute and I decided that I wanted to learn how everything worked around here. And I ended up falling in love with Nebraska.

Speaker 17 I ended up falling in love with studying a landscape and understanding how people's lives, their lifestyles, the way they look, the way they dress, the way they talk, is changed. by their landscape.

Speaker 17 Do they live where it's hilly? Do they ranch? Do they farm?

Speaker 17 Does it rain a lot? Does it snow a lot? And Nebraska is a beautiful place to study that because we have, you know, an average of like 10 inches of rainfall in the western part of the state.

Speaker 17 And by the eastern part of the state,

Speaker 17 it's upwards of 30 inches, sometimes up to 40. So there's more difference in rainfall between western Nebraska to eastern Nebraska than there is all the way from Omaha to the coast.

Speaker 17 So Nebraska is a beautiful place to study how people fit into their landscapes and their landscapes shape them.

Speaker 17 It's not flat here, as people would maybe assume from driving on the interstate, but Nebraska is home to the sand hills, which is the largest stabilized sand dunes in the world, possibly.

Speaker 17 I think definitely the western hemisphere. And we also have more river miles than any other state.
So, I love to tell people that. And there's a lot of people out here that are trying

Speaker 17 to make our city a wonderful place for everybody to live and I love living here.

Speaker 41 Hi, I'm Chelsea.

Speaker 26 I'm in the suburbs of Colorado.

Speaker 41 Even though I'm in a pretty purple part of the country, I feel

Speaker 6 safe

Speaker 63 and a mutual respect amongst myself and my neighbors, which is a very nice place to be in.

Speaker 6 I also just feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude, hope,

Speaker 63 and honestly just I can exhale every time I listen to this podcast and just know that there's people across the country who think and feel the same way as me.

Speaker 27 So this prompt brought me a lot of joy.

Speaker 19 Happy to share a little nugget of

Speaker 63 where I'm from and what it's like here and excited to hear about where others are from and what brings up joy.

Speaker 34 Hi, you're wrong about. I am calling in from Oakland, California.

Speaker 47 I'm an East Coast transplant. Oakland's always been in the news, always getting a bad reputation.
My husband and my dog and I have lived here for five and a half years. We moved in April 2020

Speaker 47 from DC and we've just fallen in love with it. It's got a lot of really tough, resilient, brilliant, beautiful people.
And I really love this neighborhood and this town.

Speaker 47 It's been a really, really fun place to live. But also in thinking about

Speaker 19 what

Speaker 47 of my home that I wanted to share, I think about my family and I think about that that's primarily my husband and my dog.

Speaker 47 And I was just thinking about last night and I couldn't sleep And I went and got my dog out of her crate. She's nine, going on three, still got that puppy soul.
And I was sandwiched between them.

Speaker 47 And I had been feeling really anxious and just awake and frustrated. And I asked my husband to spoon me, and I spooned my dog.

Speaker 47 And I was just in the middle between two great slices of bread, and I was listening to both of them breathe as I fell asleep. And that was just a really special moment of feeling really good home.

Speaker 47 And that's what has has brought me the most comfort this year.

Speaker 52 Hi, Sarah, and you're wrong about listeners. My name is Brianna Bowman.

Speaker 52 And I am leaving this voice memo from my little

Speaker 52 cottage that I rent in Newport, Oregon. I've dreamed of living here since I was a kid.

Speaker 23 I would visit here when I was young.

Speaker 52 I visited here when Keiko was at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. And then I volunteered at the Oregon Coast Aquarium and lived with my grandparents who had lived in Depot Bay.

Speaker 52 And I just returned here as a visitor over the years and always knew that this was somewhere that I wanted to end up. And last year I made the big decision to uproot my life in Alaska and make

Speaker 29 the very long drive from Anchorage to Newport.

Speaker 52 And I still

Speaker 54 feel

Speaker 23 that this is exactly where I want to be.

Speaker 52 It's where I need to be.

Speaker 52 And for the first time since I left home when I was 18,

Speaker 52 I feel truly like I don't have any intention of moving anywhere else. I still want to see the world.
I still want to see new places, but this truly is home to me.

Speaker 29 Hi, Sarah Miranda.

Speaker 56 My name is Avril.

Speaker 29 I live in Vancouver, Canada, and I live on a busy street next to kind of a funky cafe.

Speaker 29 And on the side of the cafe,

Speaker 29 there's this little red door that is a shockingly short door that looks like it should like lead to some,

Speaker 6 I don't know, underground nightclub or magical weird place where elves live. And before I lived here, I always wondered, like, what, what is that door for?

Speaker 29 What is behind it? And now that I do live here, I go through it every week to do my laundry in the cellar of this cafe that smells like mouse poop

Speaker 29 and garbage and

Speaker 29 is really not a pleasant place to spend much time.

Speaker 29 But every time I go down there, I love seeing the wonder in people's faces that are on the street just like watching me disappear into this odd red door

Speaker 29 and i just like being a part of like the mystery of like my neighborhood you know i used to be one of those people wandering on the street and now i'm on the inside and it's not as fun as it was before but i mean i'm happy to be on either side of the story

Speaker 19 i live in a smaller city just south of the Canadian border in Washington state and

Speaker 19 this summer, our neighbor down the street started a stand in her front yard where she's selling her homemade sourdough bread, muffins and cookies, beautiful loaves, and everyone started kind of congregating around her house.

Speaker 19 She has a couple of young kids, toddler age, and all the kids are hanging out there. And we have a now 10-month-old

Speaker 19 puppy, pit bull puppy, and she's very social.

Speaker 19 And so when I wasn't working or freaking out about the world, I was walking my puppy and she knows all the kids in the neighborhood and all the houses where she can get pets, meet new people, and also, you know, just enjoying my neighbor's lovely bread and the community that she's built by having the bread stand there.

Speaker 19 And it's been nice.

Speaker 19 with the exception of what's happening everywhere else.

Speaker 19 It's been a lovely summer and I'm sad that I won't get to see my neighbors as much now that it's like pitch black all the time and really cold out.

Speaker 19 But I'm looking forward to spring and having that come back again.

Speaker 7 The sun has just broken through the clouds here in Alberta, in the town where I was born and raised, that I left for a time, but I am still very proud to call home.

Speaker 7 And I have this sound to add to the sounds of places for you.

Speaker 7 That was cheering of thousands of people who showed up to a rally in support of trans folks and the right to access health care and have bodily autonomy.

Speaker 7 Alberta has a reputation across Canada as being super conservative, but it is also home to queer people like anywhere in the world.

Speaker 7 And that cheering is heartening because that's the sound of community and love and defiance in the face of oppression.

Speaker 7 So, to anybody who believes that they might be the only one in their town, wherever they are, you're not the only one. People love you.

Speaker 7 People want you to live your best life. And

Speaker 7 if you need that kind of reassurance, I hope that you can hear that cheering and know that that is thousands of people who love trans people and the trans community.

Speaker 59 Hi, Sarah and crew. My name is Brandon.

Speaker 59 I'm sitting on my porch with my favorite boxer dog page

Speaker 59 and recording this in Sitka, Alaska. I don't think you really capture living in Sitka without capturing the rain.

Speaker 59 It's a place that I've called home for a lot of years. Originally brought up here through the Coast Guard.

Speaker 59 I was struck by how easy it is to get everywhere. It's a very walk-friendly town, which was great because I didn't have a license when I first deployed here in 1998.

Speaker 59 So I got a good raincoat and learned how to live in a place that might be the opposite of San Diego County where I grew up. I am in love with this community.

Speaker 59 This morning I'll be heading off to the local dance theater, which is about a three-minute walk from me, to help load out for the Nutcracker, which is put on every other year.

Speaker 59 It'll be, I believe, my fourth time on stage in a year, as I've kind of caught a bug, both through seeing some heroes of mine in the local community recite paragraphs to me through a creepy Frankenstein play,

Speaker 59 and by the children putting on a newsies performance and finally getting to see that play on stage.

Speaker 59 I really enjoy that the town really just rallies around the arts and the artists, and that I've been able to find a little bit of that.

Speaker 59 Even though I'm surrounded by a wife and daughters that produce the most visually appealing art I can imagine, I'm more of a stick figure guy, and so this has been great for me to be able to contribute to the folks around me and to make hopefully other people want to stay in this lovely town.

Speaker 64 G'day, Sarah. My name is Victor.
I live in Australia, in the state of Victoria, in the city of Melbourne. We've got a population of about 5 million and we're a textbook example of urban sprawl.

Speaker 64 Pardon the magpies.

Speaker 64 Rippling out from our CBD, we've got trendy inner suburbs, identifying middle suburbia, and then sprawling outer suburbs.

Speaker 64 We have a lot of heritage buildings, one of the most iconic of which is Flinders Street Station. It's been operational since the 1850s, but the current facade was built in 1909.

Speaker 64 It's a great big yellow building with great big green domes on top and a big wide archway at the entrance with clock faces.

Speaker 64 The clock faces are controlled by computers now, but they used to be adjusted with a very long pole.

Speaker 64 In the inner suburbs, we've got beautiful workers' cottages, which are quite divisive now.

Speaker 64 They're narrow two-storey homes that were built in the late 1800s, some in the 1900s, that are now prime real estate for the residential apartments we desperately need to keep up with our growing population.

Speaker 64 I like the middle to outer suburbs best because of the tall trees and vibrant bird life which I'll describe now.

Speaker 64 You'll often see rainbow lorikeets and galas in pairs because they mate for life. The lorikeets have a blue head, yellow chest, green wings and a red beak.
Galas have a striking pink torso.

Speaker 64 Magpies, which you heard at the beginning of this recording, have a characteristic warble and are pleasant to wake up to in the morning.

Speaker 64 My personal favourite is the Kurrawong song, which I would describe as a two-tone twitter punctuated with high notes that rise and fall rapidly.

Speaker 64 The rest of Australia calls Melbourne coffee snobs, and we deserve that. Still, I take a lot of comfort in a smooth aromatic flat white.

Speaker 64 The media is giving a lot of air to knife crime at the moment.

Speaker 64 It's a pity because they're obviously puffing it up and it encourages people to retreat from public spaces at a time when we need community.

Speaker 64 You can find community if you look for it. Just recently, I attended a grassroots, gender-inclusive weightlifting competition called the Trans Takeover.

Speaker 64 This was its fourth annual event and I think it might be the only one of its kind in the world.

Speaker 64 On that happy note, Merry Christmas and happy holidays from sunny Australia to you, Sarah, and the Your Wrong About Collective.

Speaker 16 My name is Amanda and I am just

Speaker 16 letting you know I'm in Australia. We had a federal election this year

Speaker 16 and one of our local politicians was not looking like he was going to get his seat so he did like a PR thing and went and changed his name to Austin Trump and he was calling himself Aussie Trump.

Speaker 16 And I assume that that was in an attempt to try and get votes from people who might have

Speaker 16 supported views like Trump's policies in the US.

Speaker 16 And I'm very happy to say that Aussie Trump did not get

Speaker 16 any or many votes whatsoever during our election.

Speaker 16 So even though I think that Australia has a long way to go when it comes to racism and inclusivity of other minorities and in particular, I think disabilities and we are an incredibly ableist society, particularly where it comes to invisible disabilities.

Speaker 16 And we just have very little in place to support people with disabilities in our communities and really very little to support minorities in general.

Speaker 16 But I was very pleased to see that maybe one area where we're not completely terrible is that we didn't have a whole bunch of people voting for Aussie Trump.

Speaker 20 Hi, Sarah. This is Bryn.
I'm talking to you from Barara in Australia. And I know I don't sound Australian, and that's because originally I'm not.

Speaker 20 I moved here eight and a half years ago from America with my Australian husband and our kids. And

Speaker 20 I am talking to you from Barara, but it's also our Garingai and Darug peoples nation, our indigenous peoples. And what you hear around me is our sound of Christmas, which is the summer cicadas.

Speaker 20 Because of course, here, Christmas is happening in the summertime. So you'll hear a lot of the clicking sounds of the cicadas, a lot of the buzzing sounds, because they're all around in our trees.

Speaker 20 And a fun thing that you need to remember is don't walk under the trees in summer because the cicadas will pee on you. Bye from Barara.

Speaker 65 Kia ora, I'm Heather. I'm at the Nine

Speaker 65 Market in Lower Hut, New Zealand, where me and my partner

Speaker 65 usually go every weekend.

Speaker 66 There's about half a dozen stalls here

Speaker 66 and live music, which is basically just a guy singing karaoke. I'm just gonna stroll through and see what kind of sounds we hear.

Speaker 66 You have to see

Speaker 66 everything.

Speaker 66 Hello, Bonnie,

Speaker 66 Bonnie, Bonnie Keke.

Speaker 66 ones?

Speaker 55 Might be back, thank you.

Speaker 5 These are gorgeous.

Speaker 5 Hair cups?

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Good.

Speaker 5 How are we going?

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 66 Gotta pass through and see if my partner's got any cash.

Speaker 64 It's funny out there.

Speaker 35 Oh yeah, thanks.

Speaker 5 Hi,

Speaker 33 my name is Hannah.

Speaker 33 I

Speaker 5 usually live in Aotearoa, New Zealand at the moment,

Speaker 33 but I'm from Lutrewira, Tasmania,

Speaker 33 and I've come home for my like yearly

Speaker 33 return

Speaker 5 to

Speaker 33 uh help run a folk punk festival for our ninth year um we're an entirely volunteer run festival um and we just had it on the weekend so my voice is struggling

Speaker 33 but yeah I've just been sitting at my friend's house on her porch with a cup of tea

Speaker 33 just reflecting on the weekend and how proud I am of everyone

Speaker 33 who

Speaker 33 puts in their time

Speaker 33 and effort and sometimes money to

Speaker 33 make community events happen.

Speaker 33 And then the other people who show up for those events, it's just really special

Speaker 33 and

Speaker 33 gotta keep doing it.

Speaker 33 Community is the most important thing.

Speaker 33 Right now it's chillier than what I'm used to

Speaker 5 but it feels good and light

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 8 yeah I'm very happy here.

Speaker 4 Hi Sarah

Speaker 2 my name's Joe.

Speaker 20 I'm from Australia. I hope you can hear the sound of the wind

Speaker 8 and the birds and some kind of insect trilling over there.

Speaker 33 I'm sitting in my backyard which is

Speaker 2 a little

Speaker 20 oasis I have

Speaker 16 behind a very busy street which I live on.

Speaker 5 I'm sitting here after a really long day at work.

Speaker 33 But it's just really lovely in this garden that I've been working on for 12 months.

Speaker 2 It's finally flowering.

Speaker 2 Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?

Speaker 2 Should old acquaintances be forgot and all

Speaker 2 thanks I

Speaker 2 for

Speaker 2 language, my dear, for

Speaker 2 language.

Speaker 2 We'll take a couple of crimes this year.

Speaker 2 Almost heaven,

Speaker 2 West Virginia,

Speaker 2 Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River.

Speaker 2 Life is old there, older than the trees,

Speaker 2 younger than the mountain,

Speaker 2 going like a breeze. Country road,

Speaker 2 take me home

Speaker 2 to the place

Speaker 2 I belong,

Speaker 2 West Virginia.

Speaker 2 Mountain mama,

Speaker 2 take me home,

Speaker 2 country road.

Speaker 2 Should old acquaintance be

Speaker 2 forgotten.

Speaker 2 minors lately?

Speaker 2 Should old acquaintance be beneath the sky and just disturb the shine sun drap in my eye's fine my dear

Speaker 2 cup Milton's

Speaker 2 Hi everyone, this is Sarah Marshall in Portland, Oregon, and I am so happy to have gotten to make this episode with you. Once again, the music in this episode is by Magpie Cinema Club.

Speaker 2 Magpie Cinema Club is this show's producer Miranda Zickler and musician A.J. McKinley.

Speaker 2 I want to thank every single person who sent in a voice memo, who emailed us, who thought about it, but then time got away. It all counts.

Speaker 2 And we have been so incredibly lucky to share this year with you and to keep learning to reach out and find and build community and learn new ways to take care of each other.

Speaker 2 If you want to support the show, if you want to take part in more episodes like this, you can join our Patreon or subscribe at Apple Plus Subscriptions.

Speaker 2 And we have a good time over there. We also have an audiobook of a Christmas carol that I did a couple years ago.
You can hear that on Patreon or Apple Plus as well.

Speaker 2 We are going to take a little break at the start of next year. As some of you may know, and as you saw on our feed a little while ago, I did a CBC show about what else? The satanic panic.

Speaker 2 It's called The Devil, you know. It's out now.
It was a lot of work. We're having a little rest.
And we will be back with new episodes of You're Wrong About on January 27th.

Speaker 2 And we can't wait to see you. Take good care of each other.

Speaker 59 Anyway, thanks so much.

Speaker 33 Thanks for your podcast.

Speaker 8 I love it.

Speaker 21 Okay, thank you. Bye.

Speaker 39 Um,

Speaker 27 bye, Sarah.

Speaker 56 Thank you.

Speaker 28 Thanks. That's me.

Speaker 5 Thank you.

Speaker 34 I hope you come and see us sometime.