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.

People Who Prefer Women Either Decorative Or Uncertain

August 1, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

The Price Chopper in Granville, New York, is my third favorite Price Chopper location. Cobleskill remains first, followed by Oneonta. I attribute this preference largely to having grown up in the area, although adulthood eventually provides people with strong opinions about grocery stores, regional products, and parking lots.

All three locations have fantastic parking.

I went shopping, returned to the parking lot, and began putting everything into my Bronco. An older man approached me and commented that he liked the racing stripes. I smiled, nodded, and thanked him. He seemed nice. He then began showing me photographs of his own Bronco, totally unsolicited, which is one of those ordinary parking-lot interactions that happens when two people own vehicles interesting enough to generate conversations with strangers.

Another older man pulled up in his car to say hello. The two men began talking, and the friend asked whether the first man had bought another Bronco. The first man referred to me as male.

I corrected him. He stood firm in his false assumption. I left.

I am a woman. I use she, her, and hers. This is uncomplicated within me, though other people have occasionally attempted to make it complicated around me. Their uncertainty did not create an uncertainty of equal size in my own mind. A person can become exhausted by defending something she never doubted.

Being corrected should be one of the easiest social interactions available to a human being. Someone tells you that an assumption was wrong. You acknowledge the new information, correct the mistake, and continue with the conversation. Apparently, some people would rather defend a mistake than experience the brief discomfort of simply correcting themselves.

I drove home. When I arrived home, the furnace was not working. Neither was the air conditioning. This seemed excessive, even for a Saturday.

I called the company that installed the furnace and reached its answering service. The representative began arguing with me about whose responsibility it was to send someone out. I explained the situation. She continued explaining why the situation belonged to someone else.

I have never understood why answering services occasionally treat the person calling with a problem as though she created the problem specifically to disrupt their afternoon. The furnace was not working. I had not dismantled it recreationally. I was not calling because I wanted company. I told the representative at the answering service that I felt bad about calling on a Saturday in the first place. They hung up on me.

I called back a second time and continued the argument with another representative. Eventually, the company sent two technicians.

They listened while I explained what had happened and told them that I suspected there was an electrical short somewhere inside the furnace. They then went through the usual diagnostic routine, which I expected them to do because my assessment was not a substitute for testing the system properly.

They eventually found an electrical short inside the furnace they had installed. It was exactly what I said it likely was.

Both technicians also referred to me as male, despite having met me at the door as Emily Pratt Slatin, the lesbian who wrote for the local paper. How could anyone possibly fuck that up?

The day seemed determined to surround me with men who believed their assumptions carried greater authority than the woman standing directly in front of them. One man believed he knew my sex better than I did. The technicians initially treated my electrical diagnosis as information to be politely stored somewhere outside the active investigation until their instruments reached the same conclusion.

Apparently, this remains alarming to people who prefer women either decorative or uncertain. How dare a woman be great at rescue but also have skills as a commercial electrician.

The technicians determined that the control board was not working. Then they left. It is exactly what I had said I suspected when they arrived hours earlier.

They did not tell me they were leaving for the day. They did not say whether or not they were coming back. They did not tell me whether a part had to be ordered, whether someone else had been contacted, or when I should expect to hear from someone again.

They simply disappeared. Hours passed.

I called the company for the third time and reached the answering service again. I had to request another emergency call simply to find out what the plan was.

The technician called me on the phone. I told the technician that living without a furnace for a week in the summertime would not be a problem for me. I could open the windows. I could live without air conditioning. This is not even remotely a problem for me, and I would survive the inconvenience.

What was a major problem for me was the information being withheld from me. I told the technician not to ever do this to me again, or anyone else who worked in emergency services for any length of time, because missing information, or withheld information got people killed at my job.

I meant exactly what I said. I have seen preventable deaths occur because somebody failed to communicate, assumed another person already knew, neglected to complete a handoff, or decided that a piece of information was not important enough to pass along. Miscommunication is often described afterward as though it were an unfortunate condition that exists independently of human involvement.

It does not. Someone knew something. Someone else needed to know it. The information did not move between them in time. There are consequences that cannot be corrected afterward by improving the paperwork.

People who have never worked inside emergencies sometimes believe communication is an administrative courtesy. It is not. Communication is part of the operation. A person needs to know what has happened, what remains unresolved, who is responsible, what the plan is, and what comes next.

Communication is always the biggest bottleneck in any emergency. You make sure the information gets passed along to those who need it. You close the loop. You prevent tragedy.

I was not demanding that the technician repair the furnace immediately on a Saturday. I was not asking the company to produce a control board immediately from a local supplier. I was asking someone to tell me whether the system could be repaired today, and if not, what was their anticipated course of action.

One of adulthood’s quieter disappointments is discovering how many important systems depend upon one person remembering to make a telephone call.

I did not receive the answer I wanted. I received enough information to stop waiting for it. Waiting for something that cannot happen is inconvenient. Waiting because another person did not bother to tell you it cannot happen is unnecessary cruelty disguised as a simple miscommunication.

Civilization is maintained by people whose work goes completely unnoticed. They repair roads, keep water moving through pipes, answer calls at impossible hours, and perform the unglamorous work that allows everyone else to mistake stability for something natural. Stability is not natural. It is maintained.

The problem was that the people responsible for the system failed to tell me what was happening. That was preventable.

Later, Makayla called.

I was never legally or biologically her mother, but the important parts of raising a child have never depended entirely upon paperwork. We began by talking about her boyfriend.

The conversation somehow moved from her boyfriend to Honda car parts, then from Honda car parts to estate planning. This seemed like a perfectly reasonable progression while it was happening.

There are moments when the passage of time becomes visible without warning. I remember Makayla as a two-year-old child. I remember helping raise her. I remember the years when she needed adults to make plans for her because children are not supposed to understand how quickly life can become complicated.

Today, she was discussing her relationship, Honda parts, and estate planning. At some point, the little girl I helped raise became a woman capable of constructing a life, maintaining it, and thinking seriously about its future. The transformation happened gradually enough that there was no single moment when someone announced it had occurred.

Children grow quietly while the adults around them remain occupied with keeping everyone alive. Then one day, they call and ask questions about cars, relationships, money, property, and whatever practical arrangements adulthood has placed in front of them. I am so immensely proud of her.

Tonight, the furnace remains inoperable. I opened the windows at each end of the house so the evening air could move through. I put my 90’s playlist on low through the stereo in my bedroom. It makes the room feel like mine.

If I’m single for the rest of my life, at least I’ll be a single 90’s child.