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.

He Was The One Who Brought Up The Neighbors

November 6, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

I spent the entire day in my pajamas, recovering from the nearly six-hour drive home from Buffalo yesterday. I hadn't slept much, having discovered that I also had my period, and then received another email from the contractor who was supposed to be putting a furnace in Mom's house. Apparently, there was yet another complication preventing the propane from being delivered.

I put together four solar Meshtastic repeater nodes this afternoon, watched reruns of The Tom Green Show, and sent a few emails. I'm trying to recover.

Yesterday, Amelia complained about the enormous number of cardboard boxes accumulating in the front entryway of her house. She estimated that it would take her a month to cut everything into sufficiently small pieces to cram into the 55-gallon wheeled recycling bin that the City of Buffalo so graciously provides her.

I told Amelia that this was normal anytime someone moved. And I should know. I moved so many times for work that I eventually lost count. I should have robbed banks instead of doing rescue and EMS work. It would have paid better, and considering how frequently I moved around New York State, I'd be like Carmen Sandiego. All I was missing was a fake mustache and a getaway driver who was a last-minute replacement for someone I actually trusted.

I spent much of my twenties living out of a red 2000 Honda CR-V. By the time I finally got rid of it, the car had accumulated 700,000 miles, emergency grille lights, rear emergency warning lights, dashboard warning lights, an underbody skid plate, wrap-around pipe trim, and a luggage rack. There was also an enormous dent in the rear passenger door from an incident at Jiffy Lube.

Someone working in the bay next to mine had what was later described as a "reportable incident," and one of the jacks went airborne into the side of my car. It left a large square indentation with two smaller rounded indentations near the bottom, making the car look as though it had been attacked by a tiny dumpster.

I used that car to respond to the fire station and for my off-road adventures. It was also the car I drove on my first date with Angie. The center console bore the inscription Rescue 557.

When Angie and I met, we eventually moved to Long Island so I could work in New York City as a paramedic. I was there for two years on a contract. When the contract ended, Angie and I were homeless, and we ended up sleeping on the floor of Mom's living room for a month.

It was during that time that we had a chimney fire. I got Mom and Angie outside, and, seeing that Dad was already out of the house, assumed it would be safe to put on my bunker gear, mask up, and go back inside to deal with the fire.

I knocked it down with a 20-pound ABC dry chemical extinguisher, digging through the burning coals at the base of the chimney and mixing them with the powder before directing more of the extinguishing agent into the chimney. While I was doing this, Dad subsequently decided that he was going to come back inside without clearance. He refused to leave, even after I repeatedly ordered him outside.

The fire department arrived and went upstairs. I again ordered Dad outside. The New York State Police eventually became involved.

"Emily, is everyone out?" the trooper asked.

"No, Dad went back in. Fire is knocked down."

"Why is your dad still inside?"

"Because he's being a huge jack-off as usual."

The trooper ordered Dad outside, and Dad protested. The trooper told him that he could either spend ten minutes outside or have his daughter come pick him up from jail, which he was sure I would be absolutely thrilled about having to do after finishing my paperwork.

Dad respected police officers, even when they happened to be the same age as his daughter. He didn't necessarily extend the same courtesy to me. Eventually, Dad kicked Angie and me out of the house, and we spent several months living in a tent in the backyard, directly behind the kitchen door.

We later moved to Plattsburgh, where I worked in special rescue and EMS. That was my favorite job of my entire career. In 2006, Angie and I moved to Middleburgh, New York, where I purchased the original one-room schoolhouse at 226 School House Road for $42,000. I lived there until 2020, and by the time I left, I had almost finished renovating it.

That was the house where everything happened. It was where I received the telephone call from Mom telling me that Dad had died. It was the last house Penfold followed me to. It was where Angie and I eventually broke up after twenty years together. It was also where Makayla spent most of her childhood.

Makayla occasionally visited Mom's house with Angie when Dad was still alive. Dad adored Angie, although he didn't approve of us dating. Mom despised Angie. Penfold adored Makayla even though she called him Pencil. Dad bought Angie practically everything she wanted, while I went without almost everything, including the love and approval of my own father.

The front passenger wheel fell off the Honda CR-V in Latham, about a block away from the repair shop. I drove it there anyway and when asked why I was back so soon, all I had to do was motion towards the front of my automobile. I had considered scrapping the car, but Angie’s uncle offered me $7,000 in cash for it.

I'm still gloating about the fact that I fucked a girl on Dad's side of the bed when my parents were away on vacation.

I haven't gotten fucked this year, and I have less than two months to change that. Hopefully I can, or my record of getting fucked yearly will be set at 26 forever.

Dad had some rather elaborate plans for his funeral. He wanted a grand celebration of his life, complete with money buried alongside him for the afterlife. When he died, Mom had a different opinion.

"He's dead. Fuck him."

She said this at the funeral home and then she casually wrote a check like it was written for groceries, and paid to have him immediately cremated. Dad arrived a month later with a UPS shipping label when his remains were left unclaimed. Mom left him in a box on her nightstand. He remained there until Mom’s dying wish was to be buried together after she died.

I instead drove out to Lakewood Cemetery near Cooperstown, handed the remains to the responsible party, along with the exact burial cost in cash. As of yet, I’ve driven past the cemetery but have not stopped in. I don’t plan to add a stone. What’s the point? I’m the only one left, and nobody is left to visit.

I originally planned to mix Dad's ashes into the kitty litter a little at a time, allowing him to slowly fade away into the landfill. I later discovered that doing so might be a crime (how would they even know???).

Dad fucking hated cats. Mom laughed when I told her about my idea, then attempted to scold me for suggesting something so wildly inappropriate. Unfortunately, she couldn't stop laughing long enough to make the reprimand particularly convincing.

Mom was a little "off" herself.

For decades, she kept this rusty, almost rose-colored couch that was quite literally falling apart. The cushions had deteriorated until sitting on them was roughly equivalent to sitting on a folded blanket. The metal straps supporting the furniture were either broken, or the nail eyes holding everything together had long since surrendered.

Her cats used the back corners as scratching posts, causing the upholstery to fray so badly that the couch appeared to have grown hair. Mom adopted the cat that used to live at the bed and breakfast we used to stay out in Springville when we were supposedly visiting her family in Williamsville. The cat was a male and he fell in love with the left arm rest and would rub his crotch on it often.

The couch had stains on it. And it smelled terrible. Two years before Mom died, I made the mistake of asking her why she still had it.

She told me that I had been conceived on that couch. This was information that I had gone almost my entire life without knowing. I had spent my childhood playing on that thing with my cousins, sitting on it with my friends, and entertaining dates on it, completely unaware of its historical significance as my origin point.

I never sat on it again. When Mom died, it was the first thing to go. I paid her nurse and the nurse's boyfriend, Chase, $100 in cash to haul it to the transfer station in Harpersfield.

They discovered twenty-eight cents in loose change inside the couch. I let the nurse keep it. Finders keepers. I wasn't about to put my hands anywhere near that thing, and she figured that, considering her profession, her hands had already been in worse places.

As a former paramedic, I could appreciate her reasoning. And if you're wondering whether my fingers have ever been in surprising places.

My autism makes my hands extraordinarily sensitive, particularly the entire surface of my palms. I have always protected them, often keeping them in my pockets because the fabric provides a familiar sensation while preventing unwanted physical contact.

Thankfully, my clitoris was unaffected by this particular neurological inconvenience.

I was the only medic I knew who could reliably feel a pulse through two sets of medical gloves. Angie never knew I was autistic. I kept that part of my life a secret because I believed that if it became known, it could very well have ended my career.

And my career was extraordinarily important to me.

In 2006, I worked briefly in Kingston, New York. It was the worst job I ever had. Management was terrible, and I stood out because I was different (shock of the century). Apparently, I stood out even more than the flamboyantly homosexual man who worked shifts opposite mine, whom I saw for approximately thirty minutes each week when our shifts briefly overlapped.

I had two co-captains, Jerry and Lisa. Jerry was short, and Lisa was tall. One day, after becoming particularly irritated with both of them, I placed a New York City telephone book on Jerry's chair so he could have a few inches of "boost."

Another time, some of the guys from the crew needed to move a pool table down the street from the station, and I drove the ambulance. Though my favorite experience in Kingston began when my boss telephoned to tell me that I'd been assigned the fly car for the weekend.

There was only one problem. I had never been certified to drive the fly car. And I brought this to my boss's attention, and Lisa became angry with Jerry for failing to certify me. An argument ensued between them on the other end of the line. Those two were ridiculous.

For three decades they were EMS partners in one department or another, until finally both being promoted simultaneously to the same position as co-captain where they had two standard tan steel and particle board top state approved bureaucracy desks ten feet apart and yet they still used their desk phones to call one another instead of simply speaking a little louder than usual.

There was one time when I was called into the office for a meeting. When I arrived, Lisa picked up her desk phone and called Jerry to inform him that I was there. Mind you, Jerry was sitting at his desk approximately ten feet away from her.

I pointed out to Lisa that I could have literally just waved to Jerry or told him myself that I had arrived, considering that we were all in the same room.

"SILENCE!" Jerry shouted, just before picking up his telephone.

It was Lisa. He referred to her as co-captain. I listened to this telephone notification in real-time stereo.

Apparently, informing Jerry that I had arrived required an official telephone conversation, even though I was standing right there and he could have simply looked up from his desk.

For the longest time, I assumed they were married because they always carpooled.

Instead of taking the Dodge Durango, I took the Freightliner paramedic ambulance that I already drove forty-eight hours a week. I was assigned as the floating medic, responsible for remaining within the district and responding whenever dispatched. I drove out to the farthest point in the district, turned around, and drove back.

It was one of the best experiences of my career. I was out in Ulster county all alone, just me and the radio, and the rescue. I had an extraordinary amount of freedom, yet at the same time, I was carrying an enormous responsibility for someone my age.

When I returned to town, I fueled the rescue, backed her into the bay, connected the shoreline so the batteries could float charge, and gave her a nice wash. Five minutes before the end of my shift, we were dispatched to a multi-system trauma. I figured that if I ran fast enough, I might make it to the time clock before anyone noticed me. All I had to do was time it correctly.

I made a run for it. I missed my opportunity by approximately one-quarter of a second. The duty crew bunk room door opened.

"EMILY! You're just in time! We have a trauma, let's go!"

It was the asshole firefighter-paramedic I fucking hated. The entire call, he complained about everything, repeatedly saying fuck this and fuck that. The patient was already gone before we found them, and somehow my colleague decided that I was the problem because I didn't share his opinion that the entire world should go fuck off or something. I don't know. I'd tuned him out long before then.

He backed the rescue into the bay.

“Wash the rig again…It’s a woman’s job anyway.”

I gave her one last wash before I I clocked out and turned in my resignation. I briefly took a job at a summer camp afterward, which was also terrible. The year 2006 was one of the worst years of my life. Eventually, I found work in the area where Angie and I lived. I served there from 2007 until 2020, ultimately attaining the rank of Lieutenant-Specialist.

It was the longest job of my career. Unfortunately, working in emergency services in the same area where I lived eventually ruined the place for me. I can still remember the exact locations where tragedies occurred. Houses, intersections, stretches of road, and otherwise ordinary places became permanent reminders of the things I'd witnessed over thirteen years.

By the time I left Middleburgh in 2020, I had accumulated fourteen years of memories in the schoolhouse and thirteen years of memories on the streets surrounding it. Some were wonderful. Others were not.

I had spent most of my adult life moving from one place to another, and some of those places are associated with things I would rather forget. Which brings me back to the present and the latest complications surrounding Mom's furnace.

For years, there was a propane tank outside my bedroom window at Mom's house. The tank supplied her gas stove, and the exhaust fan vented directly outside, with part of its motor mounted externally. Now, apparently, every conceivable code complication has arisen to prevent the propane company from putting a tank anywhere near its former location.

Someone came over and asked whether I'd considered placing the propane tanks next to my garage behind the house. We could bury 100 feet of line they proposed. I asked him where he'd attended school, just in case the girl I helped raise ever decided to go back to college.

Eventually, they concluded that the only logical place for the tanks was on the back patio, where the fence had recently been removed.

"Perfect," I said.

Then the contractor brought up the fact that the neighbors had objected to that location previously, and reminded me of my response.

He actually said the words "and I quote…Fuck the neighbors."

I explained that I'd meant that metaphorically, not literally. There were no romantic feelings for the girl next door anymore. That was a long time ago. We were just friends. I was still young then.

The contractor probably wasn't interested in the history of my childhood relationships, but he was the one who brought up the neighbors. He still laughed about it. He said hold on a second and then he told the story again with the accuracy of an unreliable narrator to a curious co-worker at the main office.

When I was seven years old, I sat between Melanie Southerland, who lived next door at 76 Main Street, and my friend Amanda Lee Popp in grade school. I still see Amanda. Melanie was my Maddie at the time. There was never anything romantic between any of us, instead our friendships occupied that particular place in my life reserved for people I loved deeply as friends.

I remember when Melanie's family eventually moved away, shortly before I began dating Angie. Melanie, her mother, and her sister were cleaning out the house next door and preparing to sell it.

We remained friends on Facebook for years, until one day, she disappeared. Throughout my life, I always seemed to have one best friend. When I was a child in New York City, it was Tammy. We met at private school and became inseparable. When my family moved to Stamford, I never heard from her again.

After Mom died, I received a rather nasty letter from Tammy's mother informing me that I was to have absolutely no contact with her daughter, although she was supposedly sending her condolences. I hadn't had any contact with Tammy since 1986. Approximately 95% of the letter was devoted to setting boundaries that I hadn't attempted to cross in nearly forty years. The remaining 5% consisted of condolences, which, by that point, I was having considerable difficulty believing.