The Looking Glass World

Here is the transcript of “The Looking Glass World,” Episode 38 of The Grandma’s Been There Podcast. A link to the episode follows the transcript. You can listen to Grandma’s Been There on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

In 1969, it was often easy for me to feel like Alice Pleasance Liddell trying to navigate Wonderland and the world of opposites on the other side of the looking glass while always on the lookout for the Queen of Hearts. Outside my door, there were lots of strange creatures, a little madness, and some real danger. As for today’s story, well, it’s like Lewis Carroll said. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

Where did the winter go when it left New York? I wondered about that when I was a little girl. In grammar school, I had learned Australian kids celebrated Christmas during their summer vacations. Having spent all my years in the Northern Hemisphere, I couldn’t imagine life in reverse.

The building blocks of my winter days were gray mornings, bare trees, icy skies, early sunsets, and empty porches where people with faces hidden beneath hats and behind scarves rushed to their doorways to escape the cold. This was the backdrop of the stage where winter played out while I watched through a steamy window and waited begrudgingly for the least-loved season to lose interest in my part of the world and start…