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.

I No Longer Assume Replacement Is Equivalent To Continuity

August 12, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

I have never wanted to stay in one place for very long. That has been true for as long as I can remember. I like highways, unfamiliar towns, airplanes, dirt roads, hotels, trains, late-night diners, questionable decisions, and the particular feeling of realizing that nobody knows exactly where I am. I have always been reckless, wild, queer, free-spirited, and somewhat resistant to anyone who believed they could tame me.
At the same time, I have always needed an origin point.

I need a specific point on the map where I can tell the world that this is where Emily will eventually return from her many adventures. For me, those places became the farm in Middletown Springs, Vermont, and Mom’s house in Stamford, New York.

I never needed home to prevent me from leaving, I simply needed home to remain available when I returned.

That distinction probably makes considerably more sense when I remember how often other people decided when I was leaving. There were too many days in my life when someone informed me that I was going somewhere else, often with almost no notice. I learned early that a bedroom, school, camp, relationship, community, or entire version of my life could suddenly become temporary because someone with more authority had decided that I was finished there.

Leaving voluntarily became freedom. Being told to leave became something else entirely.

For years, I moved constantly. I thought very little of getting in a car and going somewhere simply because I wanted to know what was there. I traveled around New York, crossed into Vermont, followed roads simply because they existed, and occasionally ended up in places where ordinary people might have stopped and reconsidered the sequence of decisions that brought them there. I usually kept going.

My work allowed me to live somewhere in New York for a few years, then a better job would become available, and Angie and I would simply pick up and move to a new region of the state.

I was never the kind of girl girlfriends immediately brought home to meet their parents.

I was openly queer, intensely independent, sexually adventurous, occasionally reckless, stubborn, and uninterested in becoming the version of a woman someone else thought would be easier to explain over dinner. Women wanted to be in relationships with me, but for much of my life I was not entirely convinced anyone would choose me permanently.

That was one reason I was genuinely surprised when Amelia said she would marry me in 2021.

Marriage itself had never seemed particularly compatible with the way I lived. I had never believed in monogamy, which I regarded largely as another institution society had inherited from systems designed to control women and then dressed up as moral inevitability. Before Amelia and I married, I told her plainly that she should not expect sexual exclusivity from me. I did not hide that fact, soften it, or leave it buried somewhere in the relationship equivalent of fine print.

She knew. She married me anyway and suggested that we simply maintain an open relationship.

Our marriage was unusual from the beginning because we were primarily best friends. We were rarely sexually intimate, and eventually we acknowledged the obvious fact that we were not sexually compatible. I was the first one who had sex outside our marriage. Amelia knew before she married me that friendship, sex, intimacy, love, and loyalty had always centered around friendship—friends were all I have ever known of love.

We are still married, and yet we do not live together anymore, but we see each other regularly. Amelia recently purchased of a house of her own near Williamsville, New York.

That location means considerably more to me than it probably does to most people. My mother grew up there. I spent much of my early childhood there. My grandparents owned several properties in the area, including the old family farm on Hebdon Road.

The farm is gone now—my family sold it to someone unrelated to us despite my cash offers for the property.

Of all the places from my childhood, that is probably the one I most wish still existed. I remember acres of pine trees, the pond, the outbuildings, the old farm roads, and the freedom of being allowed to wander for hours without anyone expecting me to remain in sight. I knew where the biggest pine tree stood. More importantly, I knew how to find my way back to the house from anywhere on the property.

That may have been one of the first origin points of my life. Now Amelia is moving to Williamsville.

Amelia has said that she had a strained relationship with Mom. Mom absolutely adored Amelia. Mom asked to see Amelia one last time near the end of her life, and Amelia was not there during those final weeks. In the end, mom left everything she owned to Amelia and me.

The deed to her house eventually transferred to us. I have made a lot of changes to Mom’s house since she died. Every room has had some furniture rearranged except Mom’s bedroom. I have kept the layout of her bedroom the same.

I took Mom’s nightstand light and moved it to my bedroom at the farm. I also took the mirror that had been hanging on the wall of my childhood bedroom and brought it here. Mom had already given me half the artwork in the house years earlier. That artwork moved to the farm around the time I first brought Amelia to Stamford to meet her.

When the interior of Mom’s house needed painting, Amanda helped me photograph the exact locations where Mom had placed every piece of art that remained. Once the work was finished, I put everything back where Mom had chosen to hang it.

Amanda Popp has been my friend since childhood. She also hand-painted the white trim surrounding the decorative wall panels in the back bedroom at Mom’s house. The panels themselves have survived untouched because Mom used the room for storage and therefore never saw any reason to repaint it. Nobody has slept in that room since 1986.

I recently had the panels professionally cleaned and preserved. Now Makayla is turning that room into her bedroom.

Makayla is dating Robert Walker in Watertown. Robert is active-duty Army, and he expects to be away on a deployment for several months later this year. Makayla is establishing her own room at Mom’s house, and she is also taking over the room at the farm where Amelia used to sleep.

There are two distinct categories of friends who visit me in Stamford, and I find their behavior fascinating. Friends I made in adulthood come inside Mom’s house and naturally congregate in the traditional social areas. They sit in the living room, library, dining room, or kitchen because that is what adults do when they visit someone’s house.

My lifelong friends walk through the door and immediately head upstairs to my bedroom, even though the entire house belongs to me. Nobody tells them to do this. Somewhere inside of our friendship, my bedroom became the place where we gather. Decades have passed, everyone grew older, entire careers happened, friends married, divorced, had children, moved away, returned, and accumulated adult responsibilities, yet they still walk upstairs.

I think that is part of what an origin point means. It is not merely somewhere I know how to find. It is somewhere the people who knew me first still know where to find me.

That house was where mom and I cemented what was to become a lifelong friendship. Mom was my first lifetime best friend. I miss her every day.

I miss being able to call and tell her what I found while repairing the house. I miss reporting back after repairing something at her house that Dad had refused to repair properly because spending money on preventive maintenance apparently offended him philosophically.

Mom would have laughed and said that Dad had been, in her words, “too cheap to even consider giving a shit.”

She would have been correct.

There was one evening years ago when Angie and I were spending the night in the guest bedroom at my parents’ house. By some statistical anomaly, I had managed to get a three-day weekend from work.

Around dinner, the chimney caught fire. I told Mom to call 911 and ran outside to my red 2000 Honda CR-V. I opened the back, grabbed my bunker gear and SCBA, and headed back inside with a twenty-pound ABC extinguisher.

The local volunteer fire department arrived with the ladder truck and sent someone to the roof. Once the immediate situation was under control, I walked over to the apparatus and retrieved one of the free smoke detectors fire departments hand out to families who do not have one.

One of the volunteers had grown up knowing my parents.

He looked at me. He knew exactly who my family was and knew perfectly well that inability to afford a smoke detector was not the problem.

I looked back at him and said, “Don’t ask.”

Dad had refused to buy smoke detectors because he had lived for decades without having a fire. According to his reasoning, buying a device intended to detect something that had never happened was a pointless expense because the thing would probably never happen.

Then the chimney caught fire.

Dad possessed a PhD in atomic engineering. High intelligence does not always prevent bad decisions.

Dad’s relationship with money was especially visible in his cars.

He had an old Nissan Sentra from the 1980s that was an absolute piece of shit. The driver’s door lock had been destroyed during a break-in. The trunk lock had also been destroyed during another break-in. The car had been stolen in New York City, recovered after people removed pieces from it, and Dad repaired it anyway.

I had a dog named Emma who was my black-and-white English Springer Spaniel. She loved riding behind Dad on the driver’s side, despite suffering from motion sickness. She sat in the same place every time. She also vomited in the same place every time.

One night in 1991, Dad came home from Oneonta in that Nissan. Someone had called our house from the tennis club to warn us that Dad had gotten drunk and had disappeared into the men’s room about ten minutes earlier. Nobody could find him after that.

Mom told me to open the driveway gate. I was upstairs in my bedroom when I saw headlights shining toward the garage. Dad had made it home.

I went outside and watched him get out of the Nissan wearing his yellow sweater. He stumbled toward the garage, opened the door, got back into the Sentra, and attempted to drive inside. He clipped the garage door frame with the front bumper. About two feet of moulding snapped off near the bottom.

Dad looked at me and said, “Thomas... not a word to your mother.”

He was the only person in my life who called me Thomas. Everyone else knew me as Emily. He had used the wrong name, but I still kept my promise. I did not say a word to Mom.

I picked up the broken piece of moulding, carried it upstairs, put it in my bedroom, and waited until the following morning. Dad eventually emerged with a hangover and criticized me for something. I no longer remember what the criticism was. He repeated the same tired lines so frequently that the individual performances eventually became indistinguishable from one another. He was probably criticizing me for being too feminine, which was one of his favorite complaints.

I went upstairs, retrieved the broken piece of moulding, walked downstairs, and handed it to Mom. It had clearly suffered an impact with a plastic bumper, as there was plastic transfer on the moulding, and white paint scratched into the car bumper at the corresponding height.

I did not say anything. Mom immediately started screaming at Dad. Technically, I had complied with his instructions. Not a word. In fact, I pointed with my index finger to my closed mouth with a bored look on my face. Apparently, Dad had failed to specify restrictions regarding the transfer of physical evidence. The best part is that the same bottom two feet of moulding are still missing from the garage door frame today. I am hoping to repair it before winter.

A few days after the garage incident, Dad finally broke down and bought Mom a blue 1991 Honda station wagon. That car became one of the most important objects of my adolescence.

Mom drove me to summer camp in it. She drove me to Cooperstown for my daily commute to school in eighth grade. She drove me to Buffalo when Dad sent me away to boarding school. She picked me up during breaks.

Eventually, when Dad kicked me out at sixteen, the Honda became mine. That summer, while I worked at my old summer camp, I used the station wagon for shelter. I alternated between the car and an army tent the camp provided for the kitchen staff.

I also had lesbian sex in the back seat so many times that I had given up on keeping a running tally. I was young, working, driving around, figuring out where I belonged, having sex with my female friends, getting into trouble, and doing the kinds of things young women do when they have more freedom than judgment.

At one point, I took the Honda through a cornfield because I had seen people do that in movies and wanted to know what it was like.

I was not disappointed by the cornfield experience. The Honda itself was junk, but I loved it. I eventually hit my first deer with that car.

One summer afternoon at camp, I decided to drive past a row of traffic cones into a sand lot they were using as a parking area. The Honda immediately bottomed out. A friend had to pull me out with their car.

Fortunately, I had a fifty-foot length of static rescue rope in the back of the station wagon because I had already learned during childhood that some situations in life require more than clothesline is willing to provide. That lesson became increasingly useful later. I did a lot of stupid things back then, but I had the sense to carry good rope.

My last summer when I was working at camp as a cabin counselor, we went on a climbing day trip. The idiot woman that was the climbing director decided she knew exactly what she was doing. She held onto the loose end with the clip and threw the bag instead. She was completely confident that there was enough rope to reach the bottom where she needed to go.

I looked at her and said, “Okay, you go first, little Miss Confidence”.

She went first. She was about ten feet short. She was also my supervisor. She had told me to stand there with the campers no matter what. I was following the last set of instructions. She was now stuck ten feet from the ground. She was shouting something, but I was unable to make out what it was. Apparently she was now in peril. This was not my problem.

Somehow, after some minutes went by where I heard echoes of what sounded like profanity, she managed to swing herself somewhere and eventually made her way back to the top.

When she returned, she looked at me and then blamed the entire failure on someone else whom she claimed had not measured the rope properly. The bag stated the rope length in huge numbers on the side, and this matched what the factory had stamped on both ends of the rope.

I said, “You’d be better off pulling the pin on a hand grenade and then casually tossing the pin because you wanted to keep the spoon as evidence of your service.”

I did plenty of stupid things when I was young, but I generally understood that there was a difference between doing something stupid because I wanted to know what would happen and doing something stupid because I did not understand the equipment keeping me alive.

She then demanded to know why I didn't do anything. I said, “you told me to stay with the campers and whatever muffled things you said at the literal end of your rope I couldn't make out with absolute certainty, so I did as I was told until further instructions arrived.”

When using a rope bag, I was taught at the fire academy to always keep the bag end at ones feet and throw the loose end.

There is a clip on the loose end for a reason. The clip gives the rope weight so that the rope is far more likely to touch the bottom, and because the bag is at your feet, you know the depth and how much rope remains because the markings are one the side. This was not particularly complicated, although summer camp had a remarkable ability to introduce me to people who could make simple things considerably more interesting.

By this point, I had already served a few years in the fire department and used being still college age as an excuse to take a leave of absence to work summer jobs at my old summer camp. I fell in love with the place, not the people. That ended up being a mistake as the camp ended up firing me after I had attended camp there for over a decade and had returned to work there, now in my fourth year—all because some kid didn’t like me.

I wanted freedom, yet was more than happy to accept responsibility. I hated being confined, yet I spent decades trying to create places that would remain. I wanted to wander, but I needed an address. That may also explain more about my marriage to Amelia than either of us understood when we married.

I never needed a relationship where another woman followed me everywhere. I never believed love required sexual possession. I never believed proximity was the same thing as loyalty. I wanted someone who could remain my person while both of us continued being ourselves.

The trip to Maine complicated that. Amelia and I rented a house there. The host took issue with us being a same-sex couple and eventually he returned carrying a rifle.

I drew my pistol. I told Amelia to get into the truck. There was a tense moment where both of our guns were drawn. No words were spoken, but it was abundantly clear that we were not welcome. The man gave up, put his rifle on his passenger seat, and moved his oversized blue pickup truck out of the way. Then we left. Amelia recently posted on her YouTube channel that our marriage ended over that trip. She blamed me because I had booked the rental.

I booked the house. I did not book the hatred. Those are different things. We didn’t report the incident to the police or even post about it online.

Amelia and I can remember Maine differently. She can regard that trip as the moment something changed for her. I can remember the same day as the moment when an armed person appeared, I recognized a threat, got my wife into the truck, and left.

Perhaps my life experiences had caused me to see this problem for what it was—a temporary problem that I was able to resolve. Amelia was traumatized. That was the first time in our relationship that she screamed at me, and I cried because I had tried to take her back to where we had gone when we first met.

As far as I am concerned, what’s done is done and I’m not going to let a single bad experience ruin a place or a relationship. Amelia says the marriage ended there, yet we remain married and still see each other some of the time.

That incident indeed changed our marriage substantially. Our living arrangement changed, and the marriage simply stopped resembling whatever other people believed marriage was supposed to resemble.

Amelia has always been impulsive. The last time she was here, the internet went down for a few hours and she demanded I sell the farm.

I had to admire the efficiency of the proposed solution. The internet had failed temporarily, so apparently we should liquidate the real estate. The problem is that Amelia saw an inconvenient place to live. I saw an origin point, and I know what it feels like to lose one.

I have spent enough of my life watching important things disappear that I no longer assume replacement is equivalent to continuity. The farm in Middletown Springs is not important because I intend to remain here constantly. It is important because I can leave, but I know that I can come back. Nobody has to grant permission, and nobody has the authority to announce that I am leaving today.

Nobody gets to decide that my house, land, or life is no longer mine because I failed to satisfy some expectation they had attached to my existence.

I never wanted a place that could contain me. I wanted a place that would wait for me.