EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

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

A Woman Behind The Pine

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

This morning I woke up with a sentence already formed in my head, as if it had been waiting for me to catch up to it.

Emily… What are you waiting for?

This summer will mark thirty years since my father kicked me out of the house. Thirty years since a door closed behind me without negotiation. I do not dramatize it anymore. I do not soften it either. It happened. I left. Life went on.

Thirty years is long enough for a girl to become several different women. Long enough to acquire skills, scars, titles, land, and silence. I have lived lifetimes inside that span—firehouse years, big city years, exile years, farm years. Some of them feel compressed, as if they overlapped. So much has happened in those thirty years that it sometimes feels like it came from another lifetime entirely.

My Decembers tend to be retrospective. I let them review the record. January tends to be introspective. I turn inward and examine what it means to truly live. This year's winter ignored that boundary. December's retrospection bled into January without pause. January's introspection carried itself into the middle of February, much like the cold refusing to release its grip.

This winter has been one of the hardest. Not catastrophic. Not cinematic. Just steady. The kind that deserves acknowledgment, not witnesses.

What are you waiting for, Emily?

I keep circling that question the way I circle land I am not ready to sell. Am I waiting for the anniversary to mean something ceremonial? For thirty years to sound like closure? For someone to acknowledge that exile at sixteen rearranges the nervous system permanently?

Or am I waiting to stop measuring my life against that moment at all?

There are chapters of a woman's life that do not sit inside memory—they live in the body instead. That summer lives in mine. Not as an open wound. As a fixed coordinate. As the first time I understood that stability is not granted. It is built.

Thirty years ago I was expelled. The girl who stood in that doorway did not know what would come next. She did not have a plan beyond surviving. She did not have an inheritance waiting. She did not have guarantees. She had willpower.

I left home with an Army duffel bag full of clothes, my dog Penfold, six hundred dollars in cash, a copy of Illusions by Richard Bach, a Canon AE-1, two blank college-ruled composition notebooks, a worn copy of The Tao of Pooh, and a 1991 Honda station wagon that ran well enough not to ask questions. No contingency plan. Just paperbacks about belief and balance, a camera to document what I could not yet explain, blank pages waiting for whatever I survived next, and a car that doubled as shelter when it needed to. It did not look like a future. It looked like departure.

I think that is what the question is asking now. Not what I want. Not what I lost.

In the thirty years since I was forced to leave, I have lost more than a home. I have lost the illusion that parents are permanent. I lost my father to death without reconciliation, and my mother to time just when we had finally learned how to speak plainly to one another.

I have lost colleagues to fire, to accident, and to the quiet attrition of a profession that sometimes consumes its own. I have lost friendships that could not survive distance or my refusal to stay small. I have lost my family. I have lost entire versions of myself that once felt necessary for survival.

When Mom died, I finally let go of the firehouse identity that raised me, kept her proud, and nearly ruined me. I lost my childhood home twice—first by exile, then by inheritance. I lost the belief that loyalty guarantees return, and the idea that permanence can be secured with effort alone.

I have buried people I respected, buried Penfold, buried expectations, and buried grudges. I have watched money change nothing, institutions fold, love shift shape, and towns practice my absence until it became routine. I have lost time to endurance, softness to vigilance, and sleep to memories that never needed witnesses.

And yet, what remains is not vacancy but continuity—the proof that loss did not finish the story. It only clarified what was never built to stay.