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 Mountains Did Not Answer My Questions

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

Round Here by Counting Crows was the song that made me want to write books. I have been thinking about that lately because I decided, with the kind of confidence that usually precedes one of my stranger projects, that I wanted to go back to living like it was the 90’s again. This involved bringing back CDs, wired stereos, table lamps, old technology, physical media, and other things society apparently decided were obsolete despite most of them continuing to work perfectly well.

I have enough modern technology hidden throughout my life that enables me to communicate with satellites, move ridiculous amounts of data through fiber optic cable, and automate nearly anything with electricity attached to it. I still crave my CD player.

Apparently progress is acceptable as long as I can disguise it sufficiently. What I did not expect was to discover that the 90’s were never a style, or a vibe, or some collection of objects arranged carefully enough to trick time. The 90’s were a feeling I used to feel. Somehow, after believing it had been lost forever, I started feeling it again.

Sometime in 2020, I called Mom and told her the purchase of the farm in Vermont had gone through. The place was mine. Later that year, I told her I had found the love of my life and that I wanted to marry Amelia. Mom gave me Penfold’s ashes, and I buried him beneath the birch tree behind my house. The birch became my dreaming tree.

My original dreaming tree stood in the middle of Mom’s backyard in Stamford. It was a maple. Mom had it removed shortly before Angie and I broke up, and losing that tree bothered me considerably more than I expected it to. Eventually, its removal became part of the inspiration for A Little Ghost For The Offering.

I have been moving some of my belongings back into Mom’s house. Not everything. Vermont is still home. The farm is mine in a way very few places have ever been mine. I chose it. I bought it. I built a life there. Still, some of my things are returning to Stamford.

Some of those things began in Mom’s house decades ago. They followed me through adulthood, relationships, different houses, different versions of myself, and eventually Vermont. Now some of them are coming back.

I am still not over Mom’s death. Mom was my first best friend, and I foolishly believed I would never lose her. I understood mortality perfectly well. I spent enough of my adult life around death to understand exactly how quickly ordinary days can become the last day, and how little respect death has for anyone’s plans. None of that prepared me for living in a world where my mother no longer existed.

I think about Mom constantly when I am at her house alone. Her bedroom remains almost exactly as it was. I am changing other parts of the house. The hallway walk-in closet is mine now because I am the only person who will be storing things there full-time.

Amanda stopped by to help me paint, and I asked her if she would help paint the trim and window inside the walk-in closet in my Emily green. That is the same green I first put on the trim in my childhood bedroom in 1986.

Mom and Dad’s bedroom is different. I have no desire to redesign it. The furniture is staying where it is, and Mom’s dresser is staying decorated the way she kept it for as long as I can remember. Her room is getting the same blue for the trim that she so adored that follows throughout most of the house.

Mom used to turn on lights in her bedroom the same way I do. This is one of those insignificant details that became significant only after she died. Mom always claimed she was not autistic, although she also admitted that she had wondered about it. Before she died, she told me that when doctors diagnosed me with autism as a child, she was not surprised.

I never asked exactly what she had recognized. I wish I had. There are a lot of questions I wish I had asked. Still, I noticed things. The bedroom lights on during the daytime were always one of the things we shared.

When Mom went away on vacation, she would leave a light on in her bedroom at night on a timer so the house looked occupied. I set up the lamp on her dresser to do the same thing. It comes on automatically at dusk, stays on all night, and turns off in the morning. When I was young, that light meant Mom was away somewhere. Away is temporary. Gone is not. So every night at dusk, the light on Mom’s dresser comes on, and for several hours I allow the house to maintain the illusion that Mom is simply away for a little while.

In reality, I know she is never coming back. For most of my life, Mom being away meant there was a future moment when she would return. I did not know that this small assumption was a luxury. Most assumptions about the future are. We say goodbye casually because we expect another hello. We go to bed because we expect morning. We leave lights on because we want to believe that somebody is coming home.

When I sleep in my childhood bedroom now, I sometimes lie there and think about Christmas Eve. Mom and Dad used to wrap presents in their bedroom after I went to bed. I knew they were doing it, obviously. At some point childhood becomes a collaborative effort between children who know perfectly well what is happening and adults who continue pretending they do not.

Still, I would go to bed knowing that something was happening in Mom and Dad’s room. Morning would come. There would be presents. I was younger then and everything in my life was still ahead of me. Now I sometimes go to bed in the same room, with Mom’s dresser light glowing down the hall, and some very old part of my brain asks whether tomorrow is Christmas morning. For a moment, it feels possible. Then I remember what year it is.

The oldest version of me still lives in New York. She is stubborn, underdressed for the weather, and certain she can walk farther than everyone else. She also appears to have no respect whatsoever for chronological time.

I like her. I thought I had left her behind. For years, I separated the versions of myself geographically because it made the story easier to understand. Childhood Emily belonged to Stamford. Adult Emily belonged wherever work took her. Rescue Girl belonged to ambulances, fire stations, wrecked vehicles, terrible hours, and situations where somebody needed an answer immediately. Writer Emily belonged somewhere else.

Vermont Emily lived on the farm. This arrangement was very organized. It was also wrong. I did not leave the old versions behind. I carried them. Stamford simply makes some of them louder.

Sometimes a town forgives you for leaving before you forgive it for making departure necessary. That is what Stamford has done. It did not ask where I had been. It simply continued the conversation. I walk into places and people know me. They remember Mom. They remember my family. Some remember things about me that I had completely forgotten.

There are people who knew me before any of the books existed, before Vermont, before the farm, before I wrote down my hopes and dreams for how my life would become. There is something profoundly disorienting about being remembered by a place you spent years believing had forgotten you. Vermont gave me somewhere to become myself. New York remembered who I had been before I knew becoming was possible. A town is not its buildings. It is the collective memory of who is allowed to walk into which room without having to introduce herself.

Nora has become part of my life in Stamford. When I am in town, we spend most of our days together. She stays at Mom’s house for roughly half the nights I am there. She sleeps in the front bedroom. I sleep in mine. She stood in Mom’s kitchen barefoot, drinking coffee as though she had always belonged there.

Somewhere along the way, Nora and I started telling each other that we love each other. I am not sure exactly when it began because most important things in my life seem to happen before I realize they deserve a date.

I think friendship is one of the least adequately described forms of love. Romantic relationships receive titles, ceremonies, anniversaries, legal structures, expectations, cultural scripts, and an entire industrial complex dedicated to reminding people that romance is important. Friendship gets the word friend. That seems administratively insufficient.

My heart has never been particularly interested in categories. I have loved friends, I had sex with some of my friends, while others I did not. I have loved women romantically, sexually, platonically, inconveniently, permanently, and in combinations for which society has not prepared sufficiently useful paperwork.

Nora and I tell each other that we love each other. At night, she goes into the front bedroom. I go into mine. We leave the door between the two rooms open.

For much of my life, I believed a meaningful life had to be dramatic. This may have been an occupational hazard. Drama had already taken enough. When it stopped, my life finally began. Now some of the moments that matter most are almost aggressively ordinary.

On the way back to Vermont, there was yet another accident right after the Thaddeus Kosciusko Bridge in the northbound lane on Interstate 87. I told Maddie about it when I met up with her in Queensbury at Kashi Sushi a little after five.

The sky at the farm was alive with hues of pinks, oranges, and purple, quickly leading to a pitch black sky. The moon herself is nowhere to be found. I wondered where she had gone and why the sky on this particular evening wasn’t starlit. The mountains did not answer my questions. They simply remained where they are, which proved more useful.