A (0:17)

Welcome to the Orangabout 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. 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 non binary anarchists, I guess. And first of all, I wish and. 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. And that has a lot more to do with what anarchism is about than any kind of violence that we see in our cities. 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. 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. And if there are places where 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 wish that you knew somebody after listening to this episode, you're going to know somebody there. 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. 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. 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 AJ McKinley. Now let's climb on board, shall we? 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. 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. I'm sitting in our pretty old house, which we luckily are just renting. I mean, I don't think we would have the money for buying anything either way. But the. The house is from 1860, so it has all kinds of kinks and quirks. I'm sitting in our pretty messy living room with just the two of us living together. So we have hobby things all over the place, yarn and sewing projects and miniature painting figurines. But it's just the two of us, so it's okay. And then our cat, 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. Hello. You're wrong about Friends. I've been a fan of the show for quite a while now. 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 really sort of like relates to the feelings that I have about the places where I call home. So I'm from Great Manchester in England, and that's how. That's what they always say when people ask me. I say I'm from Greater Manchester, 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. Each of them feel like home in a different way. But, for example, Leigh is a place where all the rugby players wear leopard print. And it's the place where I learnt how to use a bow and arrow, which is now a huge part of my life. 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. 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 from sort of the city's role in the Industrial Revolution, where a lot of the workers were called, referred to as worker bees. 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. 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. And it's also the birthplace of Philomena Kunk, which is pretty cool. So that's great. In Manchester. And each one of these places is home to me in a different way. And it's an absolute pleasure to live there. Hi, I'm Marbles. So I live in a community of about 20 people, also on a trailer park in Germany. 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, for you to, to better imagine how it is 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. So, yes, when it gets colder, you hear wood chopping throughout the day. So next to our home there are train rails and once every, every other week or so, a very old train passes by. And this time, sadly, I didn't get the chuchu, but I did get the train passing by. Also speaking of choo choo, we have this wonderful habit of when someone has cooked for everyone, that someone sounds the trumpet. And tonight it sounded like this. So with this charming sound and also the fireworks that you might hear in the background. Yeah, I wish you all a good time and again I send you all the good things. Yeah. Thank you for the podcast and I'm really excited to listen to all the other postcards. Yeah, bye. Hi, Sarah. Hi everyone in the Yorongabout community. I wanted to share with you what it's like, like standing on our balcony, which is in the city of Bonn, that was the capital of West Germany until 1990. And we actually do have some ring necked parakeets living here in Bonn and also in other cities along the river Rhine, like cologne 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, 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. 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 habitants of the city. I don't know, 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. I hope you're all okay. It. This is Fajar. It's the early morning call to prayer. Happens just before the sun comes up. Casablanca is a noisy city, so this is usually the only time I actually hear it. It's the rest of the day. It's. It's delivery motorcycles all day. But yeah, you hear it from all directions. And I'm way up high on the fifth floor. Hi, Sarah, this is Cath, and I'm leaving you a message from South Africa. 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. You can hear the birds. You probably can't hear the rain because it's very light, but it is an absolute, absolutely beautiful day. And I hope you can hear what everything sounds like contrary to what your president. I beg your pardon not your president, has been saying. There is certainly no white genocide going on out here. I live in the farmlands and it's one of the most beautiful places I've ever lived in my life. So sending you love and end of the year wishes from South Africa. Hello, world. I'm speaking to you from San Juan, Puerto Rico, my home. It is almost 11pm I'm stood outside in my garden. And, and I won't bore you with too many details, but what's been said about Puerto Rico and the media recently. Tonight I just want to share with you some of the sounds from my garden. I hope you enjoy. The chirping sound you're hearing. By the way, those are frogs. That is El Coqui and is an endemic frog species from Puerto Rico. And when you grew up in Puerto Rico, as I did, this is your favorite sound in the entire world. I could never Imagine that there would be someone who did not love this sound as much as we do. But come to find out there's some people have been moving to Puerto Rico in the few past years that don't find it sound pleasant at all. And they want to get rid of El Coci. But the cookie isn't going anywhere. And neither are we. Season's greetings from my home in South Florida. It is a beautiful afternoon along the ocean. I'm here listening to the waves and appreciating the fact that there's a nice cool wind from the cold front that's coming through this evening. Florida is walking along the beach and watching great blue herons hunt for fish. It's looking for manatees swimming by just past where the waves are breaking. 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. Florida is the wonderful community of people that I have found. Florida is a place that can be really hard to love. 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. 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. Hi Sarah and all of my other fellow listeners and travelers on this road of life. Greetings from Noel in Louisiana. 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 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 and as far south as the swampy swamps of, well as swampy swamp as Slidell or the North Shore get, I guess. 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 Avoyle St. Landry Parish area of the state. It is very agrarian and I think of the seasons as harvest seasons. Right now most of the fields are full of or about to be emptied of sugarcane and in November and December the roads are covered in little bits of sugarcane debris and no one wants to get behind a cane truck. And they 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. And those will be enjoyed in the spring when the rice is planted again. The uncles that live on the road by my mom and my grandmother grew corn and soybeans and wheat. And the soybeans. Soybeans were planted in the spring and harvested in the early summer, and the corn was harvested in the late summer. And the smell of fermented soybeans that remained. And then the 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. And just saw cycles of life with crops and harvest and the gardens that my grandparents kept, 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. Hello. You're wrong about. This is Genevieve. Hi. You're wrong about. My name is Grace, 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. I've lived here most of my life, moved here when I was 4. So I really have very little memories of where I was before. And that's Houston, Texas. And I live about an hour's drive away from Houston, Texas. 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. And I would say that this state, for all its problems, can be quite beautiful. Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the entire country. All my life, I haven't been able to go very far without hearing Spanish or Chinese or Vietnamese. It's huge and it's sprawling and it's chaotic and it's messy. 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, where everything is crowded and the traffic is endless. But it is also beautiful and authentic and resilient. The people, the culture, the food, it's all so bright, so life giving. 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. People are having picnics in the grass and playing with their dogs. Couples are walking along the trails and the paths, Kids are learning how to ride bikes, and it's just so human and it's so beautiful. And in the spring, the bluebonnets 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. 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. 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. 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 campaign to make sure the only people who win elections think like them. 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, and I will always love this crazy place. I think we're worth fighting for. 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. And of course that means the most Republican, the most maga. But I persist nevertheless. And one of the things I've been doing this year is I wear a lot of gay shit. I have a lot of gay T shirts. I have rainbow sweaters. I have rainbow sneakers. I have tons of little rainbow bracelets. And whenever I'm out and about here in Williamson county running errands or whatever, I wear 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. And also because I'm of a certain age and I really don't give a shit anymore. 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 to talk back to him, because I don't care anymore. It's the blessing of not having any fucks. And I try my best to be a loud, visibly queer person 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. So I'm just as loud and obnoxious and as gay as I possibly can be. And one of the best things is when I go out and about 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. And most people just want everybody to be able to be 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. 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. And let's listen to this morning. We have robins, we have cardinals, we have starlings and sparrows. So let's listen to to these little birds. Just be happy. I refilled the bird feeder. My name is Hannah. I'm currently in Oakland, California, but I want to talk about my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. There are so many things I love about Memphis. 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. 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. I grew up in Memphis until college, leaving as my relationship with home was becoming complicated. I'm now a nurse in reproductive 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. I couldn't articulate that tension then, let alone my queerness, as so many teenage girls are. I was just angry all the time. I 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. I went to Atlanta for college, which felt impossibly cosmopolitan. For the first time, my interests were welcomed and my anger made me determined. I found queer family. That made it harder to visit home, where my parents were navigating a painful divorce. 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 with a day's notice. 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. 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. As travel became possible again, I visited a friend in San Francisco and went into a queer history museum in the Castro. I cried reading about the local activism that had happened there. Not only because it had happened, but the reverence was with which it was being spoken about. Bogged down by resisting the conservative bend on my nursing program, I could barely imagine something like this in Memphis. I started working in birth and abortion, came out, moved back to Atlanta, then to Oakland. 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. 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. I saw 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. To white conservatives, Memphis is nothing more than a place to project racist moral panics about crime onto to many coastal liberals like in California, here it's backwards, an unsafe space, a place to pity. 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 I live in the highly desirable, rapidly gentrifying oasis of purple in a deeply red state, Charleston, South Carolina. 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 tourists. 2020 we have everything. Hurricanes, flooding, so much flooding, traffic made worse by non existent infrastructure, racist senators and corrupt politicians, amazing food beaches and Spanish moss covered live oak trees. Google Strand feeding dolphins. Charleston is a drinking town with a historic problem. Mosquitoes were invented here. I love it. 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, the thing that people love most about my the charm, the small retailers, the local cuisine. The locals are being pushed out by big bad developers and the Conde Nast adherents. Charleston is becoming less and less Charleston every day. 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. Jordan Amaker from Lowcountry Local first says gentrification is a policy failure. Losing character is a failure of design. Losing demographics is a failure of policy. 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. Not just this holiday, but all year. This is my audio postcard from my backyard in Charleston, South Carolina. I grew up here, anxious in a closeted queer kid who felt so alone. 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. The appeal Charleston had to tourists and forever locals was confusing to me when I was younger. The beauty here is abundant and everywhere in the wetlands and in the people, it all just felt obvious and surface level and I was completely bored by it. I had a couple pretty traumatic events happen in my late teens and early twenties and I was extremely lost and I started acting out so I blamed the city. 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 I'm not a Charleston 10. In 2023 I had some mental health issues pop up and I knew I needed to be back in the low country. When I moved back, I made a big effort to be uncomfortable and search for connection with my newfound identity and firm beliefs. 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 create and be better. I also reached out to my childhood best friend and rekindled our friendship, though we couldn't be more different, she shows me to slow down and enjoy life. 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. The jaded view I used to have of the 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. I look at them with awe like how my friend Esther showed me to When I think of my 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. Things I used to think were boring now are precious. I overheard a conversation once about some people moving away and then coming home. 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. 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. You just have to be willing to search for them. Hi Sarah. And you're wrong about listeners. My name is Irina and I'm calling you from beautiful Richmond, Virginia. 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, which is my local mutual aid network. It's called MAT RVA Mutual Aid Distribution, Richmond. 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, we got amazing produce donations from home gardeners and from local farms. We did that through 2021. 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. And Since April of 2023, so going on almost three years, we have been providing groceries and hygiene supplies and menstrual supplies and Covid tests and baby supplies to about 200 families every week. 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. Giving food to people for free is a political act. 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. We also have treats because everyone deserves that. And we're going to keep doing this for as long as we possibly can. 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. And we, we all operate together to try to make Richmond a better, more equitable place for everyone. My name is Elizabeth and I live in Washington D.C. and this is not a postcard about the National Guard or the number of active police forces in the city, or 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. This is about Club Banneker. One of the best things about living in D.C. banneker is the public pool in my neighborhood and on the weekends in the summer summer. The DJ who is really the head lifeguard plays bumpin music. It's wall to wall people and it's an incredible experience. I love DC and I knew it was home about two weeks after I got off the plane from the middle of the country. And I hope that everyone finds a home the way that I did when I came here. My name is Jillian and I currently live in Washington D.C. 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. So I love DC 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, 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, 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. 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. 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, 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. 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. But I think what's remarkable about where I am is that I'm in a place that is truly safe and beautiful. 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. specifically. I live on Capitol Hill with the aforementioned bulldog, 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, and it's challenging to live with the duality of it. 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 and inflicted on our city. 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. 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. 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. And I laughed because that's how it feels here. There's not quite another place like this you can say go birds to being anything you want. It depends on your inflection. I guess you can say fuck around and find out because it's true. Around and find out is so important. I think. I think that we can all let things be because when you around, you're going to find out anyways. 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. I came over a ridge on Route 3 coming towards Philadelphia early in the morning as the sun was rising, going directly into my eyes 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, we have some cats. I have a husband that I met here. I have a baby that I birthed here. And I remember when I was pregnant being sad that my daughter wouldn't get the same upbringing as me. But then I remember to myself as I thought about it for longer, that I. I liked it, but I didn't love it. And maybe she'll feel the same way about living here. 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. She might not have to look for that missing puzzle piece like I did. 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 toured another apartment today. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. City of brotherly love. And Sylvester Stallone. I just graduated from college this past May, and during my senior year, I just wanted to figure out where I wanted to land. It's hard to find where you want to be until you're there and you just feel that connection 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. I fell in love with the people, the history, all of the art. And 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 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. 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. And I'm just really so excited for this next step. It's really scary, like, incredibly scary in a lot of ways, but I'm just really excited to, you know, get my hands dirty and learn more about the city and start contributing to it. I am from tire swings and tulip trees and fallen walnuts in play pretend pasta. I am from Sandy Run Creek, both deadly rushing water and expressway to the park. 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. I am from honoring those who have passed from your grandmother would have loved you and Casey watch over your sister from my mom's mom's recipes simplified and discounted and anglicized Italian slang 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. I am from nothing secret, nothing sacred, from dog hair on the couch and cement in the dryer, all else a guise of pristine. 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. You can do an entire web series on just one region of New Jersey and still have enough left over for a side podcast. See, the first misconception is that New Jersey. Jersey is just one state when it is, in fact, three. There is North Jersey heavily influenced by New York City that is full of both hill people and city people. There is South Jersey, heavily influenced by Philadelphia, which is full of pine barren people and beach people. And then there's Central Jersey where I'm from that boat. People from North Jersey and South Jersey agree doesn't exist, 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 and there are many such arguments that go on within the borders of this state that make no sense to anyone else. I don't blame people for leaving New Jersey. New Jersey is taxing emotionally, it's taxing physically, and most importantly, it's taxing financially. It's really hard to live and exist here. 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. And that's the one thing everyone gets wrong about New Jersey underestimating us. Greetings from the sweet rural sprawl of Jersylvania. 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. Here's a place where you can have some of the weirdest dreams in the country. It's mighty haunted in these woods and the spirit folk just might cross the astral thresholds into your subconscious to have a chat. Of course, you can also enjoy yourself with the local teenagers drinking and smoking weed in the graveyard. 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. 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. 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. It ain't much, but it's home. 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 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. 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 of wood soldiers. We got a giant tree going up in the middle of Rockefeller Center. We've got the Christmas decorations going up over at Saks 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. But through the magic of audio storytelling, we're gonna go up closer to where I actually live, 72nd Street. Stand clear of the closing doors, please. And just like that, we are in Central park by the pond bordering the North Woods. And I'm heading deeper in to meet a friend who lives on the other side of the park from me. And I think that is what the holidays are like for so many New Yorkers. It is the glitz and the glam of New York at Christmas. Us and just doing our best to kind of sneak away and be with the ones we care with, find those private, warm, real intimate moments. My name is Amy, and I live in western Massachusetts. I have four pear trees in my yard. 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. I'm very involved in my library. I'm very involved in my local church here. And we spend a lot of time giving things away to our neighbors. 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. And we are all saying to each other, how can we help? How can we make this little corner of the world that we live in, a more peaceful place? Hi, my name is Lucille. I live in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on Capcod. 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. Just walking around feels like swimming. The water is 75% poison anyway. In summer, it's all a parking lot. 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. 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. She pulls out hand warmers that had been turning fuzzy with life. In our damp basement, the air cools with dissipation of red, sweaty bodies. The ocean goes green and barren, and the rocky beaches are bearable again. It's not just that they're empty. The sand is soft and damp and cool. The lifeguard stands are abandoned. 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. It wraps everyone in a comfortable haze of mile long school pick up 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 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 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 sucker up. 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. 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 own oncology department. Tourists, tourists, tourists. Poor us trapped in paradise. A business flickers out. The building sits dusty. Maybe it will be a hotel someday, or another bank. My dad thinks I should write newsletters for the museum, that I should start a blog about whaling that is going to sell the house and move south. My mother tells me she will move in with me someday, that I should come home for the summer. That's sure to help that she wonders if she will miss the beach. 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. 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. This is a 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. 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. I'm calling in from just outside of Halifax, Nova Scotia and Canada. I hope you can hear the wind. It's very gray. It will be gray here until probably mid April. Gray skies, gray snow, gray mud, gray ice. But like a lot of things that exist in the gray area. Like me, actually, I'm trying to learn how to Love it. Hi, my name is Emily. I'm writing in from Tacoronto, also known as Toronto, or Toronto if you're from here in Canada. Tkaronto is a Mohawk word which means where there are trees in the water. I bring that up because for me, when I think about what makes Toronto Toronto, it's the waters. 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. It's about 2 degrees, and it's snowing a bit today. 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. In the depths of winter, the shallow parts of the lake sometimes freeze over the so much that people can actually skate on them over to the islands that are a couple of kilometers off the shore. Granted, that's happening less and less now due to climate change, but it's still pretty cool to see when it does happen. 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 because there's an art center down here, tons of ice cream stalls, and of course, the. The ferries that bring people back and forth between the mainland and the islands. 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. Over half of us who live here were born outside of Canada. So on the ferry you always hear families chatting away in English and French and Tagalog and Arabic and Amharic and Cantonese, Portuguese, Hindi. 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. 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 most people really love and value our diversity and welcome newcomers. 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 and not better, and they want to know why. And I'm scared that there are these narratives that originate here, but also elsewhere, 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. Hi, Sarah. Like you, I live in a maligned place in America. 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. That is not happening here, by the way. But Springfield is a town that suffered a lot in the recession, but there is a lot of hope here. I volunteer with a nonprofit that tutors people in reading and writing and 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. And I also wanted to share one of my favorite moments of connection with our Haitian immigrants. I had been doing some Haitian Creole on Duolingo, and I was at Meijer one day, and. And a Haitian woman carrying a big squash saw me using the produce scales, asked me how to do that, and I showed her, and she said, thank you, and I said, padqua, which is you're welcome, in Creole. And the way she lit up, it just made my day. 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. I grew up in a town called Midland, Michigan, which is, in its own way, kind of a Hallmark Christmas town. And what I mean by that is every year, there's 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. 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. 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. 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 Santas. And that's, I think, really special. It's weird. And I didn't think it was weird growing up. I thought it was just like, everybody has a manger at the courthouse, and everybody has a Santa come down across their weird little footbridge. 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. 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. Hey, Sarah, I'm calling from snowy Chicago, 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. 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. My fiance and I have become pretty close friends with a refugee family from South America, and they needed a safe and affordable place to live. They were kind of out of options, so we decided to shop for houses that would be big enough for us to share. 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. 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, seeing if they could do it in their own lives. My parents and neighbors helped, and my co workers 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. And when you give people opportunities to show up, they do. My name is Dena, and I live in Chicago in the Edgewater neighborhood. It's Thanksgiving. In about an hour. I'm gonna ride my bike from Edgewater to my husband's brother's wife's brother's house in Humboldt Park. 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. 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. 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. 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. If you listen really closely right now, you can hear the metro going by, maybe. Thanks for asking this question. I really love where I live. I think most Chicagoans do. And the things about that city that make it into the popular consciousness are often, you know, really distorted for reasons that suck. Okay, here is the sound of me riding down Kenzie Avenue with a paneer full of local beer and my dear old Wisconsin grandpa's favorite holiday appetizer, which is Fritos and egg salad. It's 3:06. It's already getting dark and it's snowing just a little bit. Hello, my name is Bianca Alva. 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. 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. And I want you to imagine that you're working in an office downtown and you've gotten a very exhausting commute home. 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. There's an act Santa sleigh between the train cars and then you get in and there's attendants dressed like elves who will hand you candy. And Jose Feliciano's Felice Navidad is playing on the speaker system. 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. 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. 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 K again. 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. 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. And 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. 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. 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. It's a weird place and it's a complicated place, but it's definitely beautiful. And that beauty cannot be separated from the winter. 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. And 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. 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, I've always been proud of Omaha, and I don't think it gets the credit it deserves. But when I was in college, for a random class, I wrote this little poem. And so I wanted to share that it went something like this. 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. My name is Morgan. I live in Lincoln, Nebraska. And I've lived in Nebraska almost my entire life. 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. 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. 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. Do they live where it's hilly? Do they ranch? Do they farm? 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. And by the eastern part of the state, it's up. 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. So Nebraska is a beautiful place to study how people fit into their landscapes and their landscapes shape them. It's not flat here, as people would maybe assume from driving on the interstate, but Nebraska is home to the Sandhills, which is the largest stabilized sand dunes in the world. Possibly, 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 to make our city a wonderful place for everybody to live. And I love living here. Hi, I'm Chelsea. I'm in the suburbs of Colorado. Even though I'm in a pretty purple part of the country, I feel safe and a mutual respect amongst myself and my neighbors, which is a very nice place to be in. I also just feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude, hope, 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. So this prompt brought me a lot of joy. Happy to share a little nugget of where I'm from and what it's like here and excited to hear about where others are from and what brings up joy. Hi, you're wrong about I am calling in from Oakland, California. 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 from D.C. 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. It's been a really, really fun place to live. But also in thinking about what 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. And I was just thinking about last night. 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. 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. 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. And that's what has brought me the most comfort this year. Hi Sarah. And you're wrong about listeners. My name is Brianna Bowman, and I am leaving this voice memo from my little cottage that I rent in Newport, Oregon. I've dreamed of living here since I was a kid. I would visit here when I was young. 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. 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 the very long, long drive from Anchorage to Newport. And I still feel that this is exactly where I want to be. It's where I need to be. And for the first time since I left home when I was 18, 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. Hi Sarah Miranda. My name is Avril. I live in Vancouver, Canada and I live on a busy street next to kind of a funky cafe. And on the side of the cafe there's this little red door that is a shockingly short door that looks like it should like lead to some, 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? 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 and garbage and is really not a pleasant place to spend much time. 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. 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. I live in a smaller city just south of the Canadian border in Washington State and and 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. 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 puppy, pitbull puppy, and she's very social 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 and, and it's been nice with the exception of what's happening everywhere else. 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. But looking forward to spring and having that come back again. 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. And I have this sound to add to the sounds of places for you. 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. Alberta has a reputation across Canada as being super conservative, but it is also home to queer people like anywhere in the world. And that cheering is heartening because that's the sound of community and love and defiance in the face of oppression. 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. People want you to live your best life. And if you need that like, 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. Hi Sarah and crew. My name is Brandon. I'm. I'm sitting on my porch with my favorite boxer dog, Page, and recording this in Sitka, Alaska. I don't think you really capture living in Sitka without capturing the rain. It's a place that I've called home for a lot of years. Originally brought up here through the Coast Guard, 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. 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. 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. 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. And by the children, children putting on anuzies performance and finally getting to see that play on stage. 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 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. 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. Pardon the magpies rippling out from our cbd. We've got trendy inner suburbs, a gentrifying middle suburbia and then sprawling outer suburbs. 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. 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. The clock faces are controlled by computers now, but they used to be adjusted with a very long pole. In the inner suburbs we've got beautiful workers cottages which are quite divisive now. They're narrow two story 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. I like the middle to outer suburbs best because of the tall trees and vibrant bird life which I'll describe now. You'll often see rainbow lorikeets and galahs in pairs because they mate for life. The Lorike parakeets have a blue head, yellow chest, green wings and a red beak. Galahs have a striking pink torso. Magpies, which you heard at the beginning of this recording, have a characteristic warble and are pleasant to wake up to in the morning. My personal favourite is the Currawong song, which I would describe as a two tone twitter punctuated with high notes that rise and fall rapidly. 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. The media is giving a lot of air to knife crime at the moment. 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. You can find community if you look for it. Just recently I. I attended a grassroots, gender inclusive weightlifting competition called the Trans Takeover. This was its fourth annual event and I think it might be the only one of its kind in the world. On that happy note, Merry Christmas and happy holidays from sunny Australia to you, Sarah, and the youe're Wrong About Collective. My name is Amanda and I am just letting you know I'm in Australia. We had a federal election this year 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. And I assume that that was in an attempt to try and get votes from people who might have supported views like Trump's policies in the us And I'm very happy to say that Aussie Trump did not get any or many votes whatsoever during our election. 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, 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. 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. Hi, Sarah, this is Bryn. I'm talking to you from Bharara in Australia. And I know I don't sound Australian and that's because originally I'm not. I moved here 8 1/2 years ago from America with my Australian husband and our kids. And I am talking to you from Bharara. But it's also our Goringay and Darug peoples nation, our indigenous peoples. And what you hear around me is our sound of Christmas, which is the summer cicadas, 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. 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 Bharara. Kia ora. I'm Heather. I'm at the Nai Nai Market in Lower Hut, New Zealand, where me and my partner usually go every weekend. There's about half a Dozen stalls here 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. Hello. Might be back. Thank you. These are gorgeous haircuts. Milk y cute. Pressure origami. Yeah. Another pass through and see if my partner's got any cash. It's one around there. Oh, yeah, thanks. I have money. You do have money. Hi, my name is Hannah. I usually live in Aotearoa, New Zealand at the moment, but I'm from Lutru, Tasmania, and I've come home for my like yearly return to help run a folk punk festival. For our ninth year, we're an entirely volunteer run festival and we just had it on the weekend, so my voice is struggling. But yeah, I've just been sitting at my friend's house on her porch with a cup of tea, just reflecting on the weekend and how proud I am of everyone who puts in their time and effort and sometimes money to make community events happen. And then the other people who show up for those events, it's just really special and got to keep doing it. Community is the most important thing right now. It's chillier than what I'm used to, but it feels good and light and yeah, I'm very happy here. Hi, Sarah, my name's Joe. Hello. I'm from Australia. Hope you can hear the sound of the wind and the birds and some kind of insect trilling over there. I'm sitting in my backyard, which is a little oasis I have behind a very busy street, Chai l live on sitting here after a really long day at work. But it's just really lovely in this garden that I've been working on for 12 months. It's finally flowering. Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind should old acquaintances be forgot and all night full night. And your inside we'll take a cup of kindness yet oh my Almost heaven West Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains Shenandoah River Life is old there Older than the trees Younger mountain Going like a breeze country road Take me home to the place I belong West Virginia Mountain mama take me home country road should old acquaintance. 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. Magpie Cinema Club is this show's producer, Miranda ZICKLER and musician A.J. mcKinley. 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. 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. If you want 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 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. 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 bit a little, little while ago I did a CBC show about what else? The Satanic Panic. It's called the Devil you know. It's out now. There's a lot of work. We're having a little rest and we will be back with new episodes of youf wrong about on January 27th and we can't wait to see you. Take good care of each other. Anyway, thanks so much. Thanks for your podcast. I love it. Okay, thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye, Sarah. Thank you. Thanks. That's me. Thank you. I hope you come and see us sometime.