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.

Home Is Where The Makerspace Exists

May 28, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

Some nights feel less like memories and more like places you can still return to. The cold morning air smelled like wet leaves, pine, and river water. Every morning, the farm smells like the childhood I spent in Upstate New York. Sometimes even small things can be as large as the promise of the coming day.

I was a small child at my grandparents farm, and I stayed up late and into the early morning hours. I remember noticing how the moonlight pooled silver across the pond behind the trees. The old barn carried the smell of hay, motor oil, damp wood, and a hundred forgotten winters. And somewhere between a lifetime of misadventure throughout New York and Vermont, I became the woman I was supposed to be all along. I have always belonged more to forests than cities.

Everything important in my life seemed to happen beside ponds, rivers, campfires, or old pickup trucks. I've had this inexplicable need to live near water. In my childhood, I spent most of my days at my grandparents farm exploring the pine forests and swimming in the pond. When I first set foot on the property in 2020, I knew that this place would be my forever home. The moon hung above the field like she was keeping watch over all of us stubborn girls. And the mountains stand around me like old friends pretending not to watch.

This morning I woke up thinking about home and how the concept and meaning was interpreted in my life. I think part of me will always belong to highway rest stops, diner coffee, and the sound of tires rolling north at two in the morning. And how I carried the Catskills and Adirondacks into adulthood the way some people carry religion.

I've been putting together a makerspace in the living room lately. Somewhere between the bookshelves, radios, and pine trees outside the windows, it started feeling like another version of home.

Until now, I've never really had a sense of home besides what memories can be forced to fit neatly inside suitcases.

I think about my childhood bedroom a lot lately. Not necessarily the room itself, but the strange little universe I once tried to piece together inside it. I spent most of my childhood quietly assembling small systems of meaning. Stacks of books. A radio humming softly late at night. Flashlights beneath blankets. Drawings scattered across the floor. Electronics taken apart carefully just so I could understand how they worked before putting them back together again. I think some part of me was trying to create a place where my mind could exist safely for a little while.

The older I get, the more I realize the makerspace in my living room is probably the adult version of that same room.

Some nights the house is quiet except for the low hum of equipment and the sound of wind moving through the pine trees outside the windows. There are bookshelves beside high voltage tools. Engineering notebooks beside coffee cups gone cold hours ago. A radio softly filling the room with distant voices somewhere out beyond the mountains. Morning light spills across the table while projects remain scattered exactly where I left them the night before. It probably looks strange to some people, but to me it feels oddly familiar.

I don't think I understood until recently that I have spent most of my life trying to recreate the feeling of safety I was searching for as a child.

For most of my life, home felt temporary. Something fragile. Something that could disappear quickly if I became too comfortable inside it. I carried that feeling everywhere with me throughout New York and eventually into Vermont. Even when I owned houses, some part of me still lived emotionally prepared for the day where I would be forced to leave them.

Somewhere between the bookshelves, radios, tools, pine trees, and the soft blue light that fills the living room every morning, something has started changing quietly inside me. For the first time in my life, I think I finally built a room I don't instinctively want to escape from.

I think I've found a new sense of patience. It has taken me some forty-six years to finally wake up in the morning and feel absolutely thrilled to still be alive. Not in the dramatic sense, nor in the manner in which people identify survival after learning something they deem profound because it required suffering. I mean in the quiet ordinary ways. Morning coffee beside open windows. Pine trees moving gently in the wind beyond the fields.

The familiar sound of Amelia moving through the kitchen while the mountains outside slowly pull themselves out of darkness.

There is something profoundly healing about being loved and included by your friends after spending most of your life preparing for disaster. But somewhere along the line, without me entirely noticing when it happened, life quietly became something more than survival. Amelia and Maddie have a lot to do with that. Amelia especially.

Now I wake up excited to see sunlight moving across the floors. Excited to hear the gravel crunch beneath tires in the driveway. Excited to continue building this strange, beautiful little life we've made for ourselves. Sometimes I still catch myself waiting for it all to disappear. Old instincts die slowly. But the feeling passes faster than it used to.

For the first time in my life, the future feels less like something I have to survive and more like somewhere I actually want to arrive.