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.

The House That Mom Left Me And The Parts Of Me That Stayed

April 22, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

The deed paperwork for moms house in Upstate New York arrived in the mail over the weekend. I must have missed it. It sat there like everything else that matters—quiet, unannounced, not demanding attention, just waiting to be noticed when I was ready, or when I wasn't.

A plain envelope arrived in the mail as a form letter, serving as a receipt that the deed had been recorded in mine and Amelia's names. It's ironic how thirty years later, the same house I left thirty years ago is now the legal property of me and my wife.

The house has seen an entire lifetime—the small child who came to live here when she was a small child, all the way through adolescence, and now in midlife, as the owner. I keep revisiting that in my mind, not because I don't understand it, but because I understand it all too well—the way time doesn't move in a straight line, the way it loops and folds and quietly returns things to you without asking.

So much has changed, yet there are still some things that time didn't erase. Despite the decades, some things still remain in a state of suspended preservation. That's the part that stays with me—the idea that a place can hold its breath for thirty years and still feel like it's waiting for you to walk back through the door, like nothing essential has shifted, like the air itself remembers the shape of you even if the mirrors don't.

From now on I will be returning to the place where I grew up on a regular basis, often with Amelia. The plan is to keep moms house for numerous reasons—one of them being spite, as moms house is desired by some of the same people who gave me a hard time over the decades.

I won't pretend that isn't part of it. It is. It sits there, clean and honest, not dressed up as anything else. The house still holds the version of me who learned how to survive without language for it yet. It holds the rooms where silence did most of the talking. It holds the early calculations under my late fathers rules—what to say, what not to say, how to move through space without attracting attention, how to exist without being allowed to exist fully.

It's almost like being handed the keys to something that once had full control over you. There's no clean resolution in that, no cinematic moment where everything balances out. It's quieter than that. It's me standing in a place that once defined me, and realizing it doesn't anymore—not in the way it used to.

Coming back to the house that raised me three decades later has taught me something I didn't have language for when I was younger—that most things in life exist on a generational basis, not a personal one.

Places don't anchor themselves to you as tightly as you think they do when you're small and everything feels permanent. They move forward, quietly and efficiently, on their own time, carrying new people, new routines, new versions of the same stories.

The place where I grew up saw me grow up as a bright young girl who dreamed of being a firefighter. That part is still intact in my mind—clear, uncorrupted, almost mystical in its precision. When I left home, the town went on without me in the way towns always do. There was no pause, no acknowledgment that someone had exited the frame.

Life went on as usual for those who remained in town. That's not cruelty—it's structure. And although I had lived my adult life in upstate New York, including much of it in the areas nearby, I would only visit my parents on occasion. Those visits felt temporary even when they weren't rushed. My father and I had a strained relationship from the start, and this caused discomfort between me and my mother. Over time, that distance stopped feeling like something to correct and started feeling like something to accept even if I never understand it.

Shortly following my assignment in Long Island/New York City, Angie and I had rented an apartment near Plattsburgh, New York, near where I had attended summer camp. At the time, I felt lost and felt a pull towards a part of New York that felt like the only version of home I had ever known.

At the time I was working as a Paramedic and rescue specialist, and my father would call on the phone and make plans to visit, sometimes giving me two weeks notice, sometimes only two days notice, expecting me to take off work from a critical public safety role at the last minute. Dad would take Amtrak from Albany, New York to Plattsburgh, and I would then pick him up after my shift.

As soon as my father arrived at the apartment that Angie and I shared, he would immediately start complaining about my performance not meeting his expectations. Everything to my father was about his expectations and how I never met them. My weight was a prominent topic of contention, as my father would often lament that if only I lost some weight, I'd lose those damn female hips. He would sometimes tell me that I only grew breasts due to being overweight and that I needed to diet. Years of the same criticism didn't cause me to lose weight as my father had hoped—if anything, it triggered an eating disorder.

I much preferred it when my mom came to visit, although for whatever reason, mom absolutely hated the fact that Angie and I were engaged to marry, but we never did, even after nearly twenty years of being together. Angie and I were always convinced that my mom had a mental illness the way she carried on when she came to visit. Whenever mom came, she would always want to go to Vermont, specifically Rutland. And yet, there was never a reason for her visit.

The last time I was at moms house, Angie and I found a large envelope with the name Emily written across the front of it in moms handwriting. Inside the envelope were fire department patches from the handful of departments I had worked over the years. Every time I got hired somewhere, I'd send a patch home to mom from my job. She apparently had collected them, starting with where I started my EMT training in Buffalo, New York.

Inside the envelope was a smaller envelope filled with old photographs taken the day my parents purchased the house in Stamford. A handful of shots that showed every outside view, some of which caught me playing in the back yard with my mom standing nearby. Hidden inside the stack of house pictures were several that showed me as a young girl living in the house—pictures that my father would likely have destroyed if he knew they existed as they showed me dressed as a girl.

And yet, most of the events captured in these photographs are ones that I don't remember. I don't remember the events of the day when we moved. I cannot recall the vast majority of my childhood. My teenage years were well documented and photographed, only for my father to throw out all my diaries, photographs, and letters from friends as a form of erasure. I have forgotten many of the adventures I had in life, yet I still haven't forgotten where I came from, and it's likely I never will. Some places just make you feel like you're coming home, even if it never felt like home until now