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.

Time Upon Time

This morning I met with Shannon, my lawyer, to discuss my will. I've been thinking about that appointment all day, although not necessarily because of anything we discussed. At forty-seven years old, I'm retired, married, and I never imagined that I would reach this point in my life before turning fifty.

Time upon time.

People grow older, retire, move away, and eventually die. Buildings disappear. Entire neighborhoods become unrecognizable. The places I remember from childhood either change beyond recognition or cease to exist altogether, and I am left wondering how the hell so much time managed to pass.

I remember a world that no longer exists, yet I don't feel nearly old enough for it to have disappeared.

Shannon is one of my favorite lawyers. We scheduled an hour together. For the first forty-five minutes, we discussed my will, how estate planning works under Vermont law, and the reasoning behind the arrangements Amelia and I had agreed upon.

Amelia and I spent the past year discussing what would eventually become of my estate. We considered the options and agreed that I would leave everything to my wife and my best friend.

The final fifteen minutes were spent telling Shannon about my adventures with Maddie over the past year.

I told her about our trip to Florida, where we started at Disney World, then took a road trip and went deep-sea fishing. Later in the summer, we traveled to California, stayed in Los Angeles, spent two days at Disneyland, and followed a series of unplanned diversions that eventually included a day on Catalina Island.

The best adventures I've had were often the ones that began with a perfectly reasonable plan and ended somewhere nobody had originally intended to go.

This past year has been one of the greatest years of my entire life. I've shared extraordinary experiences with people who genuinely love and respect me. I spent years believing that kind of happiness was something I might experience occasionally, if circumstances allowed it.

I've had an entire year filled with the kind of happiness I once experienced only during the summers of my childhood. This year, I traveled across the country, took hundreds of photographs, wrote articles, and spent more time with my friends than I ever imagined I would at this stage of my life.

Mom never got to see any of it.

She died only months before I became successful and well known as a writer. During the last year of her life, she occasionally saw my articles appearing in the newspapers, but she missed everything that happened afterward. She never got to see how widely my work would be read, or how people in Vermont would begin recognizing me by name. She never got to see my photography appearing in the papers alongside my writing.

This year I photographed the library move. I love this town. People know me here. They recognize my writing, and appreciate my photography. Sometimes I still find it strange that so many people know my name.

I wish Mom could have seen what my life has become. I think about it whenever someone recognizes me in public. I want to call her and tell her about the latest article, the latest photograph, or some ridiculous adventure that began with a seemingly ordinary decision and ended up becoming something worth writing about.

She would have loved hearing about all of it.

Everything that dies one day comes back. Trees lose their leaves and grow new ones in spring. The grass returns after winter. Flowers bloom again, sometimes in the same places they grew the year before. Even the moon disappears from view only to return a little later, apparently unconcerned with whether anyone missed her.

Mom seems to be the exception to the rule.

She has been gone forever and a day. I've been thinking about her all day, particularly about the strange two-week intervals that followed her death. It took two weeks for her to be cremated and buried with Dad's ashes. Another two weeks passed before we found her will. Two weeks after that, the court returned the paperwork naming me as the sole beneficiary of her estate.

Two weeks. Again.

A person dies, and eventually the paperwork catches up. There are documents, signatures, court orders, deeds, and official acknowledgments that something irreversible has happened. The courts eventually establish who owns what. The utilities receive a new name for their billing records. The property taxes continue arriving according to schedule.

And yet, nobody sends a notice explaining what an adult is supposed to do when she still wants to call her mother.

Mom left her house in Stamford to Amelia and me. My parents purchased the property in 1986, and very little had been done to maintain it properly during the decades that followed.

They painted the walls sometime after we bought the place, but much of the necessary maintenance was simply ignored. When I inherited it, I started by restoring the carriage house. Then I replaced Mom's furnace and water heater, addressed the drainage problems in the backyard, and eventually removed the old wooden fence that separated the two yards.

Dad had a PhD in atomic engineering, and mom was the mayor of the town, yet preventive maintenance and keeping the property looking neat apparently remained an unnecessarily complicated concept.

There are certain things about Mom's house that I have deliberately left unchanged. Her bedroom is one of them. When I was young, Mom would leave her bedroom light on in the evening while waiting for me to return from my adventures. I remember coming home late at night and seeing that light glowing upstairs.

I have the bedroom light connected to a photo sensor. Every evening at dusk, it switches on automatically and remains illuminated for a couple of hours, just as it did when Mom was alive.

Mom lived in the room across the hall from mine with the upstairs bathroom between us. My parents never shut their bedroom door, so that they could always hear me going up or down the stairs.

I need Mom's house to remain there. So many of the places I remember from childhood have disappeared. There are places I would have given almost anything to preserve, but the decision was never mine to make.

When Mom died, she left behind the house and everything she had saved from my childhood. Photographs, books, toys, old belongings, and ordinary objects that had somehow survived decades of changing circumstances. Some of those things had remained untouched for so long that finding them felt less like unpacking a house and more like recovering pieces of a world that had been misplaced.

Mom saved things that nobody else would have thought to keep. She kept photographs of me as a little girl, objects I had forgotten owning, and countless reminders of ordinary days that would otherwise have disappeared without any surviving record.

Legally, the house belongs to Amelia and me. Emotionally, I suspect it will always belong to Mom.

Stamford itself has become complicated in ways I never anticipated. The last time I went to John's Tavern, a group of people mocked me simply for saying that I was born female. The same group laughed at me when I went to use the women's restroom. Eventually someone told me to get lost because every time I came around, I supposedly brought "woke bullshit."

I haven't been back since.

I am a forty-seven-year-old woman. I was born female, raised as a girl, and have spent my entire life being Emily. I have no interest in returning to the same ridiculous arguments that dominated so much of my childhood.

And then there is Maddie.

I have always had a particular appreciation for friendships in which spontaneous decisions don't require an extensive explanation.

This summer, I went traveling and exploring with my best friend, making memories that I never could have predicted even a few years ago. Some of those adventures were planned. Others happened because one of us had an idea that seemed reasonable at the time, and the other apparently saw no reason to object.

So much of this past year has been shared with Maddie that when I remember an adventure, I often remember her presence before I remember the destination. We went to Florida, California, New York City, and all sorts of places along the way. There are photographs, stories, inside jokes, and countless little details that nobody else would find particularly interesting without having been there.

Tomorrow I'm meeting Maddie for dinner at Kashi Sushi in Queensbury on my way to Mom's house for a few days. Makayla has been staying there with her dog, Diesel. The two of us have trips planned soon, and I'm excited to see what adventures await.