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.

Emily! What Are You Waiting For???

June 10, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

This morning I awoke with a lingering thought… Emily! What are you waiting for???

The question arrived before my feet touched the floor. It was not accusatory, nor was it impatient. It simply existed, hanging in the quiet air of the morning, demanding an answer.

What am I waiting for?

I have spent much of my life charging headlong into situations that most people would hesitate to approach. My natural inclination has always been to move forward, to learn, to build, and to understand. Yet there are moments when even the most driven among us find ourselves paused at the edge of something.

I couldn't be sure what it was, and of course, nobody would be able to tell me

Nostalgia is not the belief that the past was better. More often, it is the realization that it hurt less. I had a meeting at town hall in Middletown Springs. At the last minute, I decided to drive back to mom's and stay for the weekend. Sometimes the real purpose of returning home is discovering which parts of you never left.

Some of the happiest moments of my life arrived disguised as ordinary afternoons, a few of them happened at summer camp, many of them happened here at the farm, while the majority happened at mom's house. They all involved rain.

When I was a child, I loved to go outside if only to frolic and dream for a while in the summer rain. My mother once made the mistake of giving me a light brown one-piece pajama covered with stars and moons. I would sneak downstairs before anyone else was awake and play quietly by myself. Around age eight, whenever we visited my grandparents' farm in Williamsville, New York, I began slipping outside during rainstorms. I loved the smell of wet earth, the cool air against my skin, and the strange feeling that the world belonged only to me for those few moments.

Emma was my first dog, and she was a black and white English Springer Spaniel who decided from the day we met that it was her mission to follow me everywhere I went. Emma loved my grandparents farm and she accompanied me on my many early morning adventures.

I remember my grandmother, whom I called Nina, had a favorite Persian rug in the living room which was her prized possession. She would have the rug professionally rolled up and dry cleaned twice a year—it was beautiful, but expecting it to remain pristine despite being at the center of family gatherings for decades is like throwing an absurd amount of hope down a wishing well.

My grandparents owned a lot of property—they had purchased an old farm and had planted acres upon acres of pine trees. Behind the brick and steel ranch style house was a poured concrete back porch a pond, and several out buildings. I loved the place. At the time, it was in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

One morning, I decided to get up far too early, and walked right out the back door of the house before my family woke up. Emma followed. I decided it would be a great idea to go look for frogs in the swamp next to the pond. Emma decided to go for an early morning swim, and after completing a lap in the pond, made her way over to where I was in the mud. The sound of a screen door closing in summer contains more nostalgia than it has any right to. Over the course of a few summers, I knew where the biggest pine in the forest stood, and perhaps most importantly, how to find my way back to the house from anywhere I was on the property.

Nobody ever came calling for me, they simply expected my presence at dinnertime.

There is a difference between being accepted and being understood. The atmosphere is where we begin. I was the child ignored, and now decades after the moment has passed, people are wondering where she went. There is an ironic sadness in that. They ask where she went as though she vanished, when in truth she simply stopped waiting to be noticed. The moon spends half her life being accused of disappearing when she is simply somewhere else.

I spent the entire day in the woods—I explored all the old farm roads, the trails through the woods. When I returned for dinner that evening, my pajamas were on the back porch, saturated with mud, and I had grass and leaves tangled in my hair. I had mud splatter on my face, and minor scrapes from thorn bushes all over my body. I tiptoed into my grandparents living room barefoot and naked in front of my family. My grandmother only commented about how I'd be in trouble if even a single bit of dirt got on her rug.

Suddenly Emma came charging through the door faster than my nine year old self could stop her.

The next thing I knew, Emma had positioned herself in the exact center of Nina's prized Persian rug. Apparently she believed the rest of the family deserved a detailed account of our day, because she immediately began distributing pond water, pine needles, and mud in every conceivable direction.

My cousin, who was playing a video game on his Atari had been interrupted by mud particles landing on the television screen, to which he abruptly stopped and announced, "grandpa's farm is awesome!"

My grandmother was horrified.

I arrived at mom's a little after midnight. It was raining in Stamford, and the sound of cars driving by with their tires on the wet pavement reminded me of home. I no longer need everyone to like me. I only need my people to recognize me. Most regrets are really unfinished conversations.

When mom died, I thought seriously about letting her house go. Maybe I would sell it. Maybe I would donate it to charity. Maybe a close friend of mine could have simply accepted it as a gift. As time went on, I realized that I am deeply attached to this place. Sometimes I think nostalgia is really just geography viewed through grief.

I ran upstairs to my childhood bedroom, plugged in the Christmas lights, turned on the table lamps, and opened the window overlooking the side lawn and listened to the wind as it ruffled the branches of the pine tree outside my window. The radio hummed softly beside me like it knew we would someday miss this. And for a moment, I remembered exactly what it felt like to be a bright wild-eyed child who carried with her insatiable curiosity and stars in her eyes.

I learned very young that loneliness and solitude were not remotely the same thing. And that sometimes survival looks less like triumph and more like finally feeling safe enough to unpack your books. I knew I would remember this night while it was still happening.

And in that moment, I felt a sense of freedom that had eluded me for a very long time.