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.

Honor Your Life

August 8, 2026—Watertown, New York

I have been staying in Watertown at Makayla’s apartment that she shares with her boyfriend, Robert. I met Makayla when she was a year old. At the time, I was in a relationship with her aunt Angie, and that relationship lasted for nearly twenty years. During that time, I watched Makayla grow up. I was never legally or biologically her mother, but I helped raise her and have always considered her my daughter. Angie and I eventually went our separate ways, and Makayla and I lost contact for a while, too. Somehow, we found our way back to one another.

Never in my life have I seen Makayla truly happy for what seems like the very first time. I have seen her laugh, smile, get excited about things, fall in love, make plans, and experience all the scattered moments of happiness that come and go throughout a life.

Robert appears to be good for her. I like watching them together because there is nothing particularly theatrical about their relationship. At one point, Robert was outside working on Makayla’s Honda in the driveway while I wandered around with my camera. There was something wonderfully ordinary about the entire scene.

I have spent most of my life taking pictures of things while they are still ordinary because ordinary things have an unfortunate habit of becoming important later. Nobody thinks much about the car sitting in the driveway, the storefront everyone passes without noticing, the local bar, the mall, or the expression on someone’s face while she is simply having a good afternoon. Then twenty years pass, something is demolished, someone moves away, the car disappears, the business closes, and suddenly everyone wishes somebody had taken a picture. I have learned to take the picture first.

Makayla took me around Watertown. We went to The Red Rooster and The Paddock, and we spent time at the local mall. I liked seeing the places that belong to her present life instead of bringing her into places already filled with mine. Watertown belongs to Makayla. I was simply along for the ride. Children grow quietly while everyone around them is occupied with keeping life moving. Then one afternoon, before you know where the time went, they are showing you around their city.

The mall reminded me of the peculiar freedom of wandering around somewhere without needing anything. I grew up in the 1990’s during the period when malls were social environments rather than merely buildings containing retail stores. You went there because there were people there. You wandered around, looked at things you had no intention of buying, ate something that you would regret later, wasted time, met friends, and went home having accomplished almost nothing. Yet somehow at the time, this was considered a perfectly acceptable use of an afternoon.

Modern life has developed an unhealthy obsession with making every hour productive, as though existing without measurable output constitutes some kind of personal failure.

Adults spend fortunes recreating the freedoms they were once scolded for wanting.

I think about that more as I get older. For years, I believed adulthood required becoming someone else. Instead, it seems to consist largely of carrying the same curious child farther than either of you expected. Some afternoons deserve productivity. Others deserve toy trains on a bedroom floor.

I fell in love with life years ago, and I have never stopped wanting all that it has to offer. Some of the years were absolutely terrible. People died. Relationships ended. I was sent away from places I loved, worked jobs that barely paid the bills yet expected far too much, watched emergencies become local history, and spent enough of my life believing that the next terrible thing was already on its way.

Watertown itself reminds me of everything I missed about city life. Sirens from fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars seem to occupy most of the daytime. Traffic moves constantly. Engines start, doors close, people come and go, and something is always happening a few blocks away. I have lived in Vermont long enough that I am accustomed to the quiet of the farm, where entire periods of the day pass without hearing much beyond wind through the pine trees, birds, frogs, distant agricultural equipment, and whatever animal has decided to make an alarming noise from somewhere in the darkness. I love the quiet. Apparently, I missed the noise, too.

I still listen whenever a siren goes past. Years in emergency services made that automatic. I notice direction, distance, whether I am hearing fire, EMS, or police, and whether another unit joins the response. Then the sound moves farther away and eventually disappears.

Important moments rarely identify themselves correctly while they are happening. For years, I worried about whether Makayla would find her way. She did.

I told her, “Honor your life, even when it is inconvenient, unfinished, badly timed, or understood by almost no one.”

Life has never been particularly interested in becoming properly arranged, and neither have I.