EMILY PRATT SLATIN

About

Press Kit

Gallery

Notebook

Music Playlist

She/Her/Hers Lesbian

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

Letters Written In Winter Kept To Ourselves

May 11, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

Amelia just turned thirty-nine on May 8, and she asked me what it feels like to turn forty.

I told her I was surprised I made it that far.

I meant it as a joke, mostly, but not entirely. The older I get, the more I realize how much truth I have hidden inside humor because it is easier than pausing the room, setting down an earlier than usual can of Coke, and saying the thing plainly. I am surprised I made it this far. Not because I had some dramatic death wish or because I spent my life being reckless for the sake of being reckless, but because I have spent so much of my life in places where one bad calculation, one unstable structure, or one small failure of physics could have changed everything.

My younger years were adventurous. Rock climbing. Dirt bikes. ATVs. UTVs. Long-distance biking. Mountain biking. Urban exploring. Week-long wilderness trips. Backpacking. Canoeing.

At eighteen came the start of my fire department career. High-angle rope rescues. A handful of tactical rescues. Firefighting. EMS. All the calls where danger was not theoretical, and all the moments where I had somehow completed the assignment before my emotions could catch up. I hopped freight trains a handful of times.

I think about that sometimes now, more than I used to. Maybe that is what forty does. It doesn't make you old. It makes you aware of perspective.

When I was younger, I did not think of my life as dangerous. I thought of it as adventure. I thought of it as curiosity, silence, distance, effort, and the strange relief of getting somewhere other people did not usually go. As a small child, I climbed everything. Trees, furniture, fences, mom's house, whatever structure offered height or handholds. I learned ropes early because ropes made sense to me. Knots made sense. Friction made sense. Gravity made sense. Systems either held or they did not. They were honest that way.

As a teenager, I used to climb out onto the roof of my mom's house just to get some quiet. I could see the town differently from up there. The same streets, the same houses, the same people, the same small world I was expected to fit inside, but from above it all looked temporarily manageable.

Distance gave everything shape. Nobody really understood why I needed to be up there. My mother accepted it, mostly, though as the heights increased, so did her anxiety.

I was the awkward, misunderstood, underestimated little girl who was a secret genius, though I had no clean way to say that without sounding ridiculous, arrogant, wounded, or all three.

I carried a camera and a notebook everywhere I went. I skipped school as much as possible. I documented things. I took pictures. I filled notebooks. I tried to keep records of what I saw and what I knew and what I suspected. I had so many photographs, and so many pages, and for a while I must have believed, in the quiet private logic of childhood, that if I wrote enough down, I could prove I had been there.

Then I was sent to boarding school, and my parents cleaned out my room, and all of it was thrown away. The notebooks. The photographs. The early archive of a girl who had already begun making evidence out of her own existence. I do not think I have ever fully gotten over that. I doubt I ever will. I spent most of my senior year hitchhiking.

I learned by mistake too early that records can disappear when someone else decides they are clutter. I learned that a whole private world can be erased by people who do not recognize its value. I now preserve things almost fiercely. Images. Sentences. Weather. Places. The pottery that mom and I made in the basement of Stamford. The way light fell across an abandoned room. The way silence sounded in a house after winter had gone on too long. The way a person looked at me before saying something they could not take back.

Abandoned places always felt lonely and familiar at the same time. That is probably more revealing than I want it to be. I used to think I loved them because they were strange, because they were quiet, because they had history, because they were full of visual texture and risk and evidence. All of that was true. But I think I also understood them. Empty rooms. Broken windows. Paint peeling from walls. Staircases going straight into questionable life choices. The remnants of lives other people had walked away from. I knew that feeling before I knew how to name it.

The wilderness was different. Wilderness trips gave me connection. Real connection. This was the 1990s, before social media and cell phones, before everyone carried the whole screaming world in their pocket. When my friends and I went out for a week, we were actually gone. There was bad food, paper maps, backpacks with country flag patches, canoes, muddy boots, inside jokes, shared exhaustion, and the kind of conversation that only happens when nobody can escape into a screen.

I loved hiking most, as long as the terrain did not climb steeply forever. But the hikes in the Adirondacks and New Hampshire that had ladders were my favorites. Insane elevation gains, wooden ladders bolted into rock, exposure, effort, and that sharp little thrill of looking at a route and realizing the only way through was up.

I have always felt safest either at home or outdoors. Not necessarily because the world outside is gentle. It is not. Weather can kill you. Terrain can punish arrogance. Cold does not care how smart you are. But outdoors, the variables are honest. At home, the systems are mine and for the most part, predictable. Everywhere else feels a little less certain. It is not that crowds overwhelm me. It is that when there is less to focus on, I can be more selective. I can choose the signal. I can hear myself think.

This past winter made that harder. It was the worst winter in recent memory, and I do not think I understood how badly it was affecting me until I was already deep into it. Winter in central Vermont is not decorative. It is not a postcard. It is logistics, ice, darkness, frozen equipment, bad roads, short days, long nights, and the constant low-level calculation of what can go wrong before morning. I have lived through hard winters before, but this last one got into me. It worked on my mind slowly, the way cold works into an old house through every seam nobody sealed well enough.

By February, I felt like I was functioning more than living. That is a hard thing to admit, even now. I have reached a strange point in my life where continuing to work simply for the sake of money feels almost counterproductive. Maddie and Amelia have both asked me repeatedly in recent weeks what I want to do with the rest of my life. I do not think I have an answer yet. Maybe that is part of what this winter has been about.