Welcome to the Uralg 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.

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 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 wanted 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 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,

...