EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

A Birch Tree Doesn't Decide What It Keeps

April 14, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

The birch tree behind the house changes every spring, not in any dramatic way—no sudden bloom that announces itself, no color shift that demands attention. It just becomes occupied. Ribbons and bows start appearing in its branches, one at a time at first, then enough that you realize it's no longer accidental.

The wind moves through them differently than it does through leaves—softer, quieter, like something is being acknowledged rather than disturbed. I don't question it. I let it happen the same way I let most things happen here. The tree holds them without preference. It doesn't choose which ones stay or which ones fade. It just carries them for as long as they last.

Penfold is buried at its base. I don't visit the spot the way people expect. I pass it. I notice it. Some days I stop. Most days I don't. Presence doesn't require ceremony. It just requires continuity.

Amelia and I have already decided that when the time comes, we'll be buried there too. Not as a statement, not as something to be interpreted later—just as a continuation of something that already exists. The decision didn't feel heavy when we made it. It felt obvious in the same way certain truths do. The land doesn't argue. It absorbs. It holds what is placed into it without needing explanation.

When I was a child, there was a maple tree in my mother's backyard. That was where I went to think. Not because it was quiet—though it usually was—but because it didn't interfere. I could sit there and build entire worlds without anything correcting them. It didn't require me to be anything other than present. At the time, I didn't know that was rare. I thought that was just how space worked.

There was also a pine tree outside my childhood bedroom window. It stayed the same in a way nothing else did. Winter didn't strip it down. Wind didn't rewrite it. The fire from the house next door didn't affect it. It bends when it has to and returns to itself without comment. I watched it long enough to understand that not everything needs to change in order to survive.

The birch tree doesn't function the same way. It isn't a place I go to disappear into thought. It's a place where things accumulate. Not just ribbons, not just memory—the kind of weight that doesn't press down but settles in. It's the first place on the property that felt like it could hold more than one timeline at once without collapsing them into each other. Past, present, whatever comes next—they don't compete there. They coexist.

The ribbons aren't placed with any formal structure. Some are tied carefully. Some are barely secured, left to come undone on their own timeline. The wind decides what happens to them. Some stay for months. Some disappear overnight. It isn't a system designed for permanence. It's a system that allows for presence without requiring it to last.

I don't think about legacy when I look at that tree. I think about placement. Where things end up. What gets carried forward without needing to be named. The idea of being buried there doesn't feel like an ending. It feels like staying in a place that already understands how to hold things without asking what they mean.

Most of what truly matters doesn't arrive as a decision. It shows up as a pattern you recognize too late to question. The birch wasn't planted with intention beyond what was practical at the time. It became something else through use, through repetition, through the quiet accumulation of choices that didn't feel like choices when they were made.