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.

Loyalty Over Love—Always

October 27, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

Last night I returned to the farm after spending several days at Mom's house in Stamford. I have thirty-six hours at home before leaving tomorrow for Buffalo, where I'll be visiting Amelia's new house for the first time. She needs some help with her washing machine and plumbing, so I'm bringing my tools. I suppose this is what happens when people know you're capable of fixing things.

I needed a little time at the farm to edit photographs from my trip, gather my equipment, and take care of a few things before leaving again.

On my way home yesterday, I stopped for dinner with Maddie and Andrew at the 99 Restaurant next to Wilton Mall. After arriving at the farm, I called Makayla to discuss our adventures planned for November and December. We have quite a few things to look forward to, and I'm genuinely excited about spending more time with her.

Eventually, I went to bed and was reminded that my bed at the farm is by far my absolute favorite. It's enormous, exceptionally soft, and considerably more comfortable than any other bed I sleep in.

The farm itself is still a mess. I started working on Mom's house after she died, and now I have projects underway in both places. Regardless, it feels like home.

Today I attempted to set up an MQTT server for the Middletown Springs Mesh project, for which I'm the lead engineer. I thought it would be a reasonably straightforward undertaking.

It wasn't. I spent a considerable amount of time trying to get everything configured properly before eventually admitting that I couldn't figure it out. The Mesh project has become something of a passion project following my retirement from emergency services.

On Saturday, October 24, Marisa Caruso, whom I know casually from Stamford, sent me a text message asking whether I was available to photograph a comedy show that evening at Wayside Cider in Andes, New York.

I'd never been to Andes in my life, despite living in the area for many years.

I decided to be cheeky and respond with a list of demands, much like the self-proclaimed influencers who seem to believe they require special accommodations simply for showing up somewhere.

1. I wanted free admission to the show.
2. I required complete freedom to roam around the venue while photographing. I made it explicitly clear that I needed to be able to move whenever and wherever to get the photographs I wanted.
3. I requested a Coke Classic from the bar.

Marisa immediately responded and agreed to everything. Well, shit. Now I actually had to go. Then I remembered what camera equipment I had brought with me. I had my Leica Q3 and my SL3-S with a 50mm f/1.4 lens. Fuck my life.

Nevertheless, I agreed to the assignment, and I intended to make it work.

Wayside Cider turned out to be a bar, which doesn't particularly interest me on its own. The parking arrangement was considerably more memorable.

The parking was nothing more than an unpaved alley that apparently hadn't been designed with the expectation that anyone might need to turn a vehicle around. There was one parking space remaining at the far end, which meant I had to back the Bronco down the alley and maneuver into it.

A driver approaching the entrance had graciously offered to let me go ahead of them. Unfortunately, my intended direction of travel was backward. This apparently confused and aggravated them. I eventually parked the bronco and made my way inside.

The show consisted of sketch comedy, and my favorite performance involved a woman who had created a home movie about discovering an old Macintosh computer beside a trash bin with the word FREE written on it.

She brought the computer home in a wagon filled with apples. Her husband immediately found the situation suspicious and held up a shotgun, apparently regarding the discarded Macintosh as some kind of threat.

The next thing I knew, the woman was going on dates with the computer. They fell in love. The computer joins her in a candle lit bath, then the following scene shows the computer next to the woman in bed with a cigarette on the screen.

I have no idea who comes up with this shit, but I thought it was hilarious.

Yesterday, while buying paint at Ace Hardware in Stamford, something happened that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. Sarah, who works there, is someone I've known since my parents moved to Stamford in 1986. She's known me for forty years, although I haven't lived there for most of that time.

She asked how my dog was doing. I told her that my dog had died years ago. She was genuinely shocked. What surprised me even more was that she apparently had no idea how much time had passed since I'd lived in Stamford. I reminded her that I left home at sixteen, and that my appearances over the past thirty years have generally been brief, infrequent, and often entirely unexpected.

She couldn't believe it had been that long. I found myself thinking about how thirty years of my life had apparently collapsed into what seemed, from her perspective, like a couple of months.

I spent so much of my life away from Stamford that I never really thought about the impression I might have left on the people who knew me. I assumed that, as the years passed, I would become someone they vaguely remembered from the past, if they remembered me at all. Apparently, that wasn't entirely true. Without ever intending to, I seem to have established something resembling a legacy in my hometown.

I wonder whether the same thing will eventually happen here in Middletown Springs. I don't particularly care whether anyone remembers my accomplishments. I'd rather they remember who I was, how I treated them, whether I kept my word, and whether I stood by the people I cared about.

Loyalty over love—always. I have become deeply suspicious of anyone who introduces themselves by listing their accomplishments. Eventually everyone runs out of adjectives. Character is what remains.