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.

Do You Know Emily The Writer?

September 12, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

I woke up an hour before I actually needed to this morning. This was my normal routine throughout my entire career, although today I was getting ready to volunteer as a photographer at the Middletown Springs library.

I made coffee, started taking notes, and turned the stereo up a smidge higher than I normally would at that hour. The playlist consisted of Simon & Garfunkel's The Boxer, Long Time Nothing New by Pete Yorn, I Stay Away by Alice in Chains, Outsider by Blanco White, Heavy Metals by Noah Gundersen, Caught by the River by Doves, Hold Her Down by Toad the Wet Sprocket, Counting Blue Cars by Dishwalla, and The Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby. This was apparently the appropriate soundtrack for moving a library.

I drank my coffee and kept taking notes. At some point, I realized that I was following exactly the same routine I used when I was working. I always got up about an hour earlier than necessary because I needed time before work to drink coffee, listen to music, think, and write down my thoughts.

Firefighting eventually becomes muscle memory. Put enough years into the job and your hands know where things are before you consciously think about reaching for them. High-risk EMS and specialized rescue is different. Those skills are almost entirely mental. You learn to arrive somewhere with incomplete information, determine which information actually mattered, identify what could go wrong next, establish several possible courses of action, and then remain sufficiently flexible to abandon all of them when reality inevitably produced some bullshit nobody had mentioned over the radio.

I was very good at that after twenty-two years. Coffee. Notes. Music. Shower. Coke Classic to go.

Then I went into my closet to figure out what I was going to wear. I saw my old NYC work sweatshirt. It says LIEUTENANT on it. I put it on. Fuck it. Nobody is going to notice.

Along the drive, the playlist kept going. The last song before I reached the library was Shelby Means' Fisherman's Daughter. That one caught me differently. I listened while Vermont moved past the windows and thought about the girl in the song.

This should have been straightforward. It mostly was.

Almost immediately, however, someone came up to me and informed me that they had not signed a release and therefore did not consent to having their photograph taken.

I looked at them. There were nearly two hundred people around us. I was photographing a crowd of people moving a library, not conducting an individual portrait session. I let them know that they never bothered to ask me to sign a nondisclosure agreement, so this interaction was definitely going into my diary entry for today.

The look on their face immediately switched from annoyed to confused. That was approximately the amount of intellectual energy either of us were willing to allocate to the matter.

At some point, someone came over and started talking to me.

"Do you know Emily the writer?"

I looked at them.

"Yes, very well," I said. "My entire life, in fact. We go way back."

This was completely true. In fact I did not correct the misunderstanding immediately because there are moments in life when correcting someone is less interesting than seeing where the conversation goes. Rumor has it, we have been through some shit together.

The next witness approached sometime later.

"You know," they said, "I don't believe for a second that you were in the fire department. Not even for a day."

"Okay," I said, "good to know."

Eventually, someone else came up to me, and this encounter went in precisely the opposite direction.

They knew exactly who I was. They knew of me through my work extremely well, and they wanted to talk to me about my life. The temptation, as a writer, is to assign significance to coincidences like that.

Before I left, I ran into the woman who married Amelia and me. She asked how our marriage was going.

"It's going great," I told her.

"Really?", she inquired.

Then I mentioned that Amelia and I had maintained an open relationship since the first day we were together, I was successful in this endeavor, and that's how we made it work.

She looked absolutely mortified.

Her husband thought this was hilarious.

I was somewhat confused by this because she had asked how the marriage was going, and I had just told her it was going great. Apparently there was additional information contained within my answer that she had not anticipated receiving.

Apparently this is what retirement looks like.