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.

Ordinary Days Never Seem Important Enough

August 23, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

Makayla and Robert have been at the farm since Friday. Makayla brought her dog, whom she calls Doug or Diesel. I have heard both names used often enough that I stopped asking which one is correct. The dog does not seem especially concerned about it either.

On Friday night, we tried to go to the Poultney Pub for drinks. We arrived late enough that the staff told us they would be closing soon and suggested Tomasi’s in Fair Haven instead. I had never heard of Tomasi’s.

Apparently, an entire bar had been operating in Fair Haven without my knowledge. We went there instead. It ended up being a dive bar, which I prefer. The staff and patrons were nice—I told Makayla and Rob that we need to go back next time they’re in town.

Yesterday, I took Makayla to the W. H. Williams general store in Dorset. She bought a dog biscuit for Diesel and told the staff that she had an Amish dog because she adopted him from the Amish. After paying for the biscuit, she could have put it in the bag with my purchases. Instead, she placed the dog biscuit directly into her brand-new Coach handbag.

I watched her do this. So did the college-age cashier who awkwardly paused, made a brief motion with her hands, before giving me a look of confusion.

We stopped at Mach’s Market in Wells on the way home. I like driving through that part of Vermont. It’s a short drive but the road twists and turns so it adds scenic travel time. This works well for Makayla because she has been chronically late for the past twenty-six years.

I have spent a considerable portion of my adult life waiting for her to arrive, finish getting ready, locate whatever she cannot find, or accept that the scheduled time we had agreed to previously is and will always be irrelevant. Eventually, I stopped expecting this to change. Vermont has mountains. The farm has lots of pine trees. Makayla is running late. Some things in life will never change

When we returned to the farm, she walked into the house and left out the back door walking around the backyard in my rubber farm boots. When she was a small child, I came home from work one day and let her wear my fire boots. They were enormous on her. She stepped into them anyway and tried to walk, despite the boots almost reaching her waist.

I remember watching her try them on. Today, I asked whether she remembered wearing them. She did not. I had carried that memory for so long that I assumed she had carried it too. That is one of the strange things about raising a child. Adults remember moments the child had no reason to keep. Something can remain perfectly clear in one person’s life while disappearing completely from the other.

People smile for photographs beside houses they will sell, cars they will wreck, friends they will lose, and people they will someday grieve. I regret that I no longer have any photographs of some these moments.

I asked Makayla what her earliest memory of me was. She thought about it intensely as if in a trance-like state and a haunting refrain I was not prepared for. Finally she said her first memory of me was our first vacation in North Conway, New Hampshire.

We stayed at the Hampton Inn with Angie. The hotel had an indoor water park, and she remembered the water slides—hers was the green full pipe, where I preferred the yellow half pipe. She was twelve. There had been an entire long childhood before North Conway. I remembered parts of it. I remembered the little girl in my fire boots. I remembered helping raise her, and taking her to the wooden playground in Cobleskill. She did not. There is no loneliness quite like remembering something nobody else remembers.

Helping raise Makayla was one of the greatest and most rewarding things I have ever done. I do not know whether I ever told her that. I have never spoken affection as easily as I have shown it. I remember details people assume nobody noticed. I show up. I cook too much food. I talk too much about how I learned to cook while working at the fire department. I check that people made it home alive afterward without admitting that I was worried.

When Makayla was little, she saw me as a hero. She knew I was a firefighter and paramedic. She knew the uniform, the apparatus, the equipment, and the boots. Although she remembers me picking her up in a fire truck on my way back to the station. She did not know what happened at work. I never spoke of the job at home.

There was nothing useful in making a child carry the things I had seen that day merely because I carried them. She did not need to know what happened before I came home. When she put on my fire boots, they were simply my boots. I wanted them to remain that way for her.

There are people who believe heroism is whatever happens during the emergency. Sometimes it is. More often it is coming home afterward and refusing to make the people you love live inside it with you.

There are people I miss, and there are people beside whom I miss the person I used to be. Those are different forms of grief.

I am proud of the woman she became. She remembers a version of me I no longer entirely recognize. I remember a version of her she cannot remember being. Neither of us knew we were supposed to preserve those things for the other.

For dinner, I grilled steaks and fire-roasted rainbow peppers and re-heated the loaded mashed potatoes Makayla wanted from Mach’s. She suggested that we eat at the picnic table in front of a campfire. This was an exceptionally good idea.

I told her that after twenty-six years of chronic lateness, the campfire suggestion had redeemed the decades of inconvenience. We ate outside by the fire with Diesel sleeping at my feet in the freshly cut grass.

I have spent enough of my adult life around emergencies to understand how quickly an ordinary day can become something else. Ordinary days never seem important enough while they are happening. Only later do we understand that these were the days we wanted more of.

We stayed outside as daylight began to leave the mountains. The fire continued burning, the plates slowly emptied, and I kept thinking about the boots. The moon was visible before sunset. She had apparently declined to wait for appropriate conditions.

This morning, Makayla and Robert left at ten to drive back to their apartment in Watertown. I told Makayla I loved her, and let Robert know that I approved of their relationship and that I respected him. Makayla backed me up by telling Robert that being respected by me is something that very few people achieve.

I sent her a text about an hour into their drive home.

I just wanted to say… Thank you for 24 years of giving me a great life. Helping raise you was one of the greatest things I have done in my life. I’m so very proud of you!

I had lost a handful of people at work. Robert is part of the United States military. Perhaps the greatest lesson the job ever taught me was to not wait to tell people how you really feel, because so many times in my life, I hesitated and it was too late.