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.

For The First Time I Wasn't The New Girl In Town

March 15, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

This afternoon Amelia and I drove into town for the annual Maple Festival. No ceremony about it. Just the two of us in the truck, the road doing that familiar slow curl through the hills toward the center of Middletown Springs. Late winter still had its grip on the air, that thin Vermont sunlight hanging over everything like it wasn't entirely convinced it wanted to stay. The kind of afternoon where the snow is mostly gone but the ground still remembers it.

The annual Middletown Springs Maple Festival is one of those small town rituals that somehow manages to be both ordinary and slightly mythological at the same time. Folding tables. Paper plates. Metal silverware washed meticulously by volunteers. The smell of sap boiling outside while people in flannel jackets stand around the fire explaining the process just as generations did before us.

I was hesitant at first about attending. It's a social gathering, I have always been different, never truly fitting in anywhere. It was on my calendar as a suggestion—most things are written on the kitchen calendar here with the understanding that there is a 50% chance of being scratched out.

Amelia said she wanted to check it out, and I said if she was going, then I'd drive her, and so we went. I drove in half expecting the same thing I have always expected in life—the quiet feeling of being the outsider standing just beyond the circle of the firelight.

I have been that person most of my life. For six years now Amelia and I have lived here. Six Vermont winters. Six mud seasons. Six cycles of watching the hills turn green and then gold and then white again.

Six years is a strange amount of time. Long enough to know the rhythm of the place, but not long enough to feel like the ground itself has learned your name.

Or so I thought. We parked, stepped out of the Bronco, and walked inside like anyone else would. Just two women wandering into a sea of people, most of whom I had never seen before.

That was the first thing that struck me. The crowd. Faces everywhere, and the overwhelming majority of them were unfamiliar. Not in a bad way. Just new. New families. New people. New lives quietly settling into this valley while Amelia and I were busy living our own.

Apparently time had been moving forward for everyone else too. For years Amelia and I have carried the quiet label of the new people in town. It is one of those rural designations that can last indefinitely if the social gravity never shifts. You can live somewhere ten years and still be the newcomer if no one newer shows up.

But standing there today, surrounded by strangers who had arrived after us, something subtle clicked into place. We were no longer the newest story in town. We were now just…part of it.

And then something happened that caught me completely off guard. Out of nowhere, through the noise and the laughter and the shuffle of boots on hardwood floors, someone looked straight at me and said—"Hey, you're Emily, right?"

Just like that. No hesitation. No confusion. No polite Vermont squint trying to place me. Recognition. I stopped for a second, because it takes a moment for something like that to land properly when you have spent most of your life assuming invisibility. You learn that belonging is temporary. You learn that things change, cities change, people change, and sometimes the ground disappears out from under you without warning.

But here, in the middle of a maple festival in a small Vermont town, someone knew who I was. Not as a stranger. Not as a newcomer.

Just… Emily.