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 Mansion In The Center Of Town

May 20, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

I always remember the last things people say when they are leaving.

The last time Dad spoke to me, I asked him why he had abandoned me as a child. It was not a rhetorical question. I was not asking for a speech, an apology, or the kind of deathbed reconciliation people imagine when they have been raised by loving parents and still believe the world bends toward tenderness. I asked because I wanted to know.

I had spent my life already knowing the answer, but I wanted to hear him say it. I wanted to know whether there was anything human behind all those years of rejection, displacement, and punishment, or whether the wound itself was exactly as shallow, cruel, and stupid as it had always seemed.

His answer was that I was supposed to be his son, and that I had failed him at the most basic task, which was to be born male. Therefore, I was an idiot and a failure. He told me to leave.

So I did.

I left, went home, and then called work and went back for a few extra shifts. A tried and true way for me to deal with family drama was to simply vanish for a few days, maybe a week, and by that time, something else eventually comes along to replace my trespasses.

Four days later, Dad died.

Mom called me the morning he died. When I answered the phone, she asked about my day and whether I had any plans. I told her I had the day off. Then I asked, "And why?"

She told me your father died with the emotional weight one might use to report that the team they were rooting for had lost a football game. Not grief. Not shock. Not tenderness. Just information, delivered after small talk, as though death itself required proper social pacing. There was a familiar undertone of inconvenience in her voice.

Neglect is not always loud. Sometimes it arrives in ordinary sentences, in the absence of urgency, in the bland municipal administrative tone of a parent who has no idea how to feel for anyone outside herself. Sometimes the most devastating thing a parent can do is make catastrophe sound routine.

Mom and Dad cared deeply about optics. They cared about how things looked, how the family appeared, how the house stood, how the collection shone, and how their lives could be described to other people. Mom had even considered hiring a professional obituary writer to document her life and accomplishments. When she died, I ended up writing it myself.

They did not care about their own daughter in the way most parents care about their own daughter. If they had, I would have had an almost ideal childhood. That is the part that makes the whole thing so obscene. There was overwhelming opportunity. What was missing was the most basic thing—care.

Mom paid more consistent attention to her ceramics collection than she did to me. The pieces were kept behind built-in glass cabinets. Every few months, she took them out, polished them, told me they were valuable, and placed them back again. She kept a separate photo album documenting the collection in greater detail, complete with handwritten notes. They were never ever used. I was not allowed to touch them. Nobody was.

They were held captive behind glass with the promise that one day, when she and Dad were not around, I would be able to sell the collection. That was how she spoke of inheritance. Not memory, not family, not beauty, not use—sale. Future value. Deferred transaction. Things preserved so carefully that they were never allowed to participate in life.

I thought about that when I left Mom's house this morning. The ceramics were protected, polished, and displayed. I was corrected, exiled, and left to myself. Their objects were guarded from damage or unwanted touch. Their own daughter was not.

Wear, decay, and entropy are all similar yet distinct forces within the physical universe. Wear implies use. Decay implies neglect. Entropy is simply the inevitable drift of everything toward disorder, dispersal, and collapse. A worn thing has been touched, carried, trusted, handled, needed, and loved. A decayed thing has been left. Entropy waits for all of it.

Physical objects show evidence of their own existence eventually, given enough time.

My bedroom door at Mom's house is not the original door to the house. It was originally installed in the basement. When I came out as a lesbian at sixteen, Dad stormed up the stairs, broke my door, and beat the shit out of me.

Someone else might see a mismatched door. I see the broken boundary, the violence, the impact, the basement door installed afterward, and the house quietly continuing as though the change meant nothing. Houses remember. They remember even when the people inside them lie.

When I went back, my childhood bedroom was still in the same exact configuration it had been in when I left thirty years earlier, under everything Mom had hoarded. It was not preserved with love. It was buried.

That told me all I needed to know about how my parents felt about me. A room can be kept as a shrine, or it can be entombed by someone who cannot process loss, change, departure, or reality.
My room was under all those years of accumulation, the old version of me still expected to be there somehow, the living version of me having gone on to become someone neither of my parents ever properly knew.

When we lived in New York City, Dad would be home on Friday afternoons, and Saturday and Sunday were supposed to be family days. That was the official mythology. In reality, I was often seated at the dining room table with a portable television set, watching Mister Rogers' Neighborhood while my parents were nowhere to be found. It is strange to think of it now. A child alone at the dining room table, taking comfort from a man on television who spoke gently to children, explained feelings, offered reassurance, and never once seemed angry that a child needed kindness.

My father eventually got tired of us not bonding and enrolled me in figure skating lessons at Sky Rink in New York City. I do not remember being there very long. I lacked the coordination to advance into the actual classes. I remember my father screaming at me from the railing while the other girls asked why some old man was yelling at me, which embarrassed me. Even then, before I had the language for it, I understood there was always a right kind of child in his mind, and I kept failing to resemble the one my parents wanted.

In New York, my parents stayed upstairs in their room most of the time, and I pretty much took over the living room. When we moved upstate, my parents took over the living room and library, and I had my apartment upstairs in my childhood bedroom with everything I needed. By age ten, it resembled a college dormitory. That was my childhood in many ways: materially supplied, spatially separated, emotionally left to run almost entirely on my own. What I did not have was the steady presence of parents who wanted to know me.

Mom's place was huge. When I was a kid, I used to ride my BMX bike through the downstairs and out the kitchen door. I can still feel the motion of it, the childish thrill of moving through the oversized rooms, and the little private racecourse I made out of a house that was often too still, too quiet, and too concerned with presentation. I lived in that house more fully than they did.

When Mom died and the contractors came to her house, the first thing they wanted to do was renovate the kitchen. I said no. Absolutely not. Not now. Not ever.

They do not understand how someone gets attached to the way things used to be physically. For them, the kitchen is old cabinetry, old counters, and old flooring. For me, it is Mom's kitchen. Brown wooden cabinets, layered linoleum, and the place where I learned what love felt like when no adult in the house could be bothered to show me.

When I was a little girl, I would come home from school crying and sit on the kitchen floor leaning against the wooden cabinets. The multi-layer linoleum was cold when I first sat down, but it soon became warm beneath me. Penfold would always come over, lick my tears, then sit beside me pressing his strong back against my side in solidarity. If my breathing changed or I moved, he would immediately look at me like a status check. At the time, it was all I ever knew of love.

That is why the kitchen stays.

The kitchen isn't perfect. It's not supposed to be. Nothing is ever perfect, except maybe on occasion the moon herself.

Penfold always came because he loved me. His body against mine was not symbolic at the time. It was immediate. Weight, warmth, loyalty, and presence.

Penfold enriched my childhood simply by refusing to let me be alone.

There are two things I can never forgive my parents for: boarding school and Penfold.

I was molested and sexually assaulted at boarding school. Mom knew, and she decided to keep me placed there because taking me out would upset my father. That is the sentence. That is the moral structure of the family, reduced to its barest form. My safety ranked below his emotional comfort.

I called Mom from a pay phone in Buffalo to tell her what had happened. I did not use the phone in the dorm because we had been advised in the school handbook of "possible monitoring," and I knew the administration might be aware of at least part of the conversation if I called from inside.

A child should not have to think that way. A child should not have to assess risk and communication systems before asking her mother for help. But I did.

When I told her, she said, "Oh well."

Later, when I confronted her about it, her reply was, "I didn't know how to respond to the news."

That was it. Not remorse. Not horror. Not "I failed you." Not "I should have come for you." Just a total dismissal dressed up as confusion. She did not know how to respond, so she chose not to protect me.

I have spent most of my life trying to understand people, but there are some things that cannot be made acceptable by understanding them.

When I hung up that pay phone, the handset clicked onto the latch, and the coins dropped into the bucket inside the phone at the same moment as the realization. Me and Penfold were on our own from then on. I was seventeen.

There are moments in life when childhood does not end gradually. It ends with a sound. A click. Coins falling into a metal collection bucket. An analog dial tone gone dead. The realization that no one is coming, not because they do not know where you are, but because they know full well and have decided to leave you there anyway.

Before boarding school, I had come home from summer camp wearing friendship bracelets that my female friends and I had made and traded with each other. I wore them all summer. I had tan lines on my wrists from them.

The sun had recorded the memories of friendship onto my skin. When I got home, Dad cut the bracelets off my wrists. Less than a week later, he sent me to boarding school.

This was my first year of boarding school. My father's instructions were clear: I was to attend boarding school and come out a man. There was no excuse why I can't make the honor roll the entire time. The bracelets were feminine, and apparently I had not seen the memo.

Dad absolutely hated that I dressed in pastels and bold colors. He hated so many natural expressions of who I was. My clothes, my softness, my friendships with girls, my identity, and my refusal to become the son he had invented in his mind before reality disappointed him. He saw difference as failure. I see now that he was wrong about nearly everything that mattered.

I have always been fascinated with Saturn, whom I perceive as nonbinary. Saturn exists beyond the small rigid categories that frightened my father so much.

Saturn is ringed, distant, strange, beautiful, and magnificent without needing permission. The moon is nearer, more intimate, and more faithful in her appearances, but Saturn has always felt like a declaration from the outer dark—that there are forms of existence no human father can reduce to his own disappointment.

I think that is also why I am drawn to pine trees. They are different. When everything else goes bare, they remain visibly themselves. They are not tidy. They drop needles, bleed sap, bend under snow, take scars, hold wind, and keep standing. They do not apologize for being evergreen. In winter, they are proof that life continues even when the rest of the world looks stripped down and done.
I have only named three people as best friends in forty-six years: Matthew Jacob Orlando (who grew up in nearby Harpersfield, New York), Amelia Phoenix Desertsong, and Madeline Grace O'Malley.

I do not use that term lightly. To me, friendship has never been casual decoration. It is not a social accessory. It is kinship, allegiance, and chosen continuity. My parents accumulated objects. I have been far more careful with people.

My time as a medic in New York City remains one of the most interesting and important eras of my young adult life. I still sought connection. Despite everything, I still believed there had to be something better than what I had known at home, and there was. EMS gave me perspective. It showed me that the vast majority of people are genuinely nice people who work hard, try their best, and show up for those they care about, regardless of origin.

I saw people frightened, exhausted, poor, wealthy, angry, grieving, sick, injured, drunk, sober, alone, loved, and dying. I saw strangers help strangers. I saw families try. I saw neighbors stay. I saw people do imperfect but humanly decent things in impossible moments.

Today, I told Amelia that I am keeping Mom's house even though it does not make sense. It does not make sense financially, practically, or perhaps even emotionally, depending on which version of me you ask. If anything, it feels like my just reward. I obtained the one thing that meant everything to both of my parents: the house they referred to as, "Their Mansion in the center of town."

They loved that phrase. Their Mansion in the center of town. The status of it. The way it positioned them in relation to everyone else. It was never just a house to them. It was proof, display, permanence, and identity.

Now it belongs to me and Amelia. My late father would never have approved of any of this.

I am keeping the things Mom and I created together, and half of the furniture. Mom had double furniture throughout the house because she was always expecting company. Sadly, the only people who ever came were my father's side of the family. The last time I spoke to any of them was nearly twenty three years ago.

If I tried to sort and sell everything she left behind, it would take me the rest of my life, and even then, I would have accumulated perhaps two weeks' worth of my investment income. The financial value is almost beside the point. The emotional cost of sorting through all of it would be far greater than the money. I am not obligated to spend the rest of my life processing the residue of hers.

The house is still full of objects, many of which have outlived their meaning.

I sold Mom's car to someone I have known since childhood who grew up in town. The New York license plate on her car said PENFOLD8. Penfold for infinity. I still find it ironic that she chose a vanity plate honoring a dog she killed.

I came home to the farm this morning with Amelia. My parents had their mansion. I have the farm, Amelia, and finally, a home.