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.

Places Collect Versions Of Us

August 10, 2026—Watertown, New York

I returned to the farm this evening at 8:15 after spending several days with Makayla and her boyfriend, Robert, in Watertown. I had gone there knowing I was going to meet him for the first time. I came home having made a friend.

Robert and I got along almost immediately, which was probably helped by the extensive list of overlapping interests between us. He served in the Army. I spent much of my adult life as a firefighter and paramedic, with rescue as my specialty. There are some people you meet and spend the first several conversations searching for common ground. With Robert, the common ground was already there. More importantly, I watched him closely around Makayla.

While Robert was at work, Makayla and I made two separate trips to Syracuse. The first trip involved Destiny USA, the Apple Store, Lego, a new MacBook Pro, and an unsuccessful attempt to get tattoos together. Apparently we had both decided that a spontaneous tattoo was a perfectly reasonable addition to an already unplanned week.

Unfortunately, nobody seemed to have walk-in availability, and some of the shops were booked into next year. I told Makayla that perhaps we should make an appointment with the woman who does my tattoos in Burlington, Vermont, instead.

The clientele appearing at some strip-mall tattoo parlors seemed to have more tattoos than teeth, which did little to increase my confidence in the decision-making process. Makayla laughed.

During the drives, she talked about Robert almost continuously. She was flat-out in love with him. After spending several days with both of them, I told Robert that I thought highly of him and supported their relationship completely. I meant it.

On Saturday, August 8, the three of us made a last-minute decision to spend the night in Norwich, New York. Some trips begin with reservations, schedules, detailed itineraries, and several weeks of preparation. Others begin because three people look at one another and collectively decide that remaining where they currently are has become unnecessarily limiting.

Makayla found an Airbnb directly on Main Street, within walking distance of the bars. It was a loft apartment on the top floor of a mixed use commercial building, with the kind of layout older downtown buildings acquire after generations of additions, renovations, and people deciding that whatever strange architectural feature already exists is probably easier to keep than remove. At one point, I found what I thought was a closet.

Behind the apartment storage were were stairs leading upward to a roof hatch. And the hatch was of course, left unlocked. I let Robert know. We agreed that later that night, we should check it out.

That night we went to Rita’s, The Broad Street Tavern, and Park Place Restaurant & Tavern. Staying directly on Main Street meant nobody needed to drive, which allowed the evening to remain pleasantly unstructured. We ate, talked, visited bars, wandered between places, and eventually made our way back to the apartment.

After we returned from the bar, Makayla and Robert went through the roof hatch and onto the roof to take in the sights and sounds of Norwich at night. There are decisions people make before going to a bar, and there are decisions people make afterward. Climbing through the roof hatch of an Airbnb to stand above Main Street belongs firmly in the second category.

The following morning, I took them to Cooperstown to see the National Baseball Hall of Fame. It was Robert’s first time there. Mom once drove me to school in Cooperstown in grade eight. Decades later, I was driving Makayla and Robert there on a Sunday morning so that Robert could see the Hall of Fame for the first time.

Places collect versions of us without asking permission. Sometimes an old place acquires a new memory before we realize it has happened.

During today’s Syracuse trip, Makayla and I had lunch at Aloha Krab in Destiny USA. The waitress misgendered me. I corrected her. She apologized and explained that she had initially read everything about me as female, but became uncertain after I said hello because of my voice.

My voice has been androgynous since I was twelve. I have lived with it for so long that I rarely think about it unless someone else decides to. I had not been misgendered in well over a year, so the incident caught me off guard more than anything. The waitress apologized and tried to explain that everything about me had read as female until I spoke.

What I found most interesting about the trip is when Makayla introduced me to people she knew while we were out at bars, she introduced me as her mom. She said it exactly the way I would have introduced my own mother to someone.

“This is my mom.”

Then the conversation continued.

I have always thought of Makayla as my daughter. I met Makayla around the time she was turning two. She was Angie’s niece. Angie and I were together for nearly twenty years, and somewhere inside that relationship, I made myself a promise that I would be a good role model for Makayla.

I stayed for many reasons. Makayla was one of the main reasons. I wanted her to have at least one adult in her life who believed in her. My relationship with her never fit neatly into one category. I was part aunt, part mother, part lifelong friend, and occasionally whatever else the situation required. I watched her grow up. I worried about her. I became frustrated with her. I was proud of her. I missed her when we were not speaking. I remained invested in her life long after the original family connection between us stopped being a useful explanation.

Then, at twenty-six years old, she stood in a bar and introduced me as her mother. People imagine that the significant moments in relationships will announce themselves properly. In cinema, someone sits down, clears ther throat, then the room becomes quiet. Words are chosen carefully. The relationship is reclassified.

Real life rarely has that kind of discipline. Sometimes someone simply introduces you—and that is how you find out.

At some point during the trip, Makayla asked me whether she had been a difficult child to raise. I told her no, she was an easy child to raise.

She likes to sleep late, stay awake late, create her own schedule, and conduct her life her way. She has always been free-spirited. So was I. But difficult? No. Absolutely not.

Makayla was quiet. I trusted her. I could trust her to do the right thing. Not because she was incapable of making mistakes, but because childhood mistakes and character are not the same thing.

Her family seemed to find fault with almost everything she did, including things so minor and ordinary that almost every adult I know could cite an equivalent example from childhood. Somehow, these things were remembered, repeated, and kept alive decades after they had stopped having any reasonable relevance.

Makayla is twenty-six years old. To know Makayla is to love her.

I told her what I actually remembered rather than the version of herself she had apparently been told. At twenty-six, she still needed to ask me whether she had been difficult to raise.

She could hear the sorrow in my breathing while I told her. I apologized for not telling her the truth sooner. The apology was unnecessary, and we both knew it. We also both knew why I could not tell her these things at the time.

Some truths become complicated inside families long before children understand why. Adults often believe children do not notice the conflict happening around them, when children are usually the people carrying the largest portion of it.

I was still sorry. Regret is not always a reminder that someone did something wrong. Sometimes it is simply the awareness that something good should have happened sooner.

I still wish I had told her years ago.

I have spent much of my life thinking about the difference between what happened and what people will later claim happened. People repeat stories until repetition becomes confused with family history. Eventually, the person standing at the center of the story begins wondering whether everyone else remembers something she somehow missed.

Makayla has known me for almost her entire life. That is usually how the important parts of life happen. They hide inside ordinary days. People are rarely simple enough to fit inside whatever story a family decided to keep telling.

That thought stayed with me on the drive home. I returned to the farm tonight at 8:15. Only a few days had passed. Somehow, the trip contained decades.

There are conversations people should not have to wait twenty years to have. There are also conversations that become possible only after enough time has passed that the narrative no longer belongs to everyone else.

I cannot change what Makayla was told about herself when she was young. I cannot go back and tell the little girl I knew that she was never the problem everyone made her believe she was. I cannot undo the years when saying that plainly would have created consequences neither of us needed.

But I can tell her now. I can tell her she was a good kid. And apparently, after all these years, I can stand beside the little girl I once promised to look after while she introduces me to someone as her mom.

I could not take Makayla to work with me for obvious reasons. Once, after a call for service turned out to be minor, I brought work to her instead. The crew and I stopped by the house with some of the fire trucks. I do not remember what the original call was anymore. Makayla still remembers riding around the block with me in the truck.

I thought I was keeping a promise to be a good role model. Somewhere along the way, without either of us formally deciding when it happened, I ended up having the same kind of mother-daughter friendship with Makayla that I had with my own mother.

As I left Makayla’s apartment in Watertown, I told her that I never wanted to have children of my own, but should I decided to, I would have wanted to have a daughter just like her.

Makayla turned out exactly like me, and I am so immensely proud of the woman she has become. And as for Robert, I promised him that, no matter what, I will always have his six.