A short time after I met Maria, and understood how badly she wanted to be doing her art, I offered her the use of one of my barns. Maria is not a person who takes things from others – she insisted on working on the farm to repay me – and I agreed.

We were close friends almost immediately, we each saw something in the other than we wanted and needed, but it was instinctive.  I think it was a passion for creativity that first connected us.

I knew the moment I met her that she needed a place to do her art. She said I was the first person she had ever met who knew that. And she was the first person in my life to tell me that my photographs were good.

Neither of us ever imagined being divorced or re-married, especially me, I was already in my 60’s and had given up on love and sex in my life. I was losing hope and falling apart.

I rarely saw Maria in the months after that, she would come to her new “studio” barn, which she fixed up and changed to her liking late at night, sometimes as late as 2 or 3 a.m. She’d bring her wolf-dog Frida, the man-killer. She was dying to eat me.

I never went over there, she never came to the farmhouse, which was across the street. I heard the dogs bark and sometimes heard music drifting from her new studio.

I had the sense that she worked all night.

By now, most of you know we got married a couple of years later, our divorces were painful and difficult, we got through it together.  All through it, and perhaps because of it, we worked at night.

Maria and I both love to work at night, we work at night almost every night. Her humble but beautiful potholders were born at night.

Maria has been making some remarkable art lately and selling it quickly. She loves to work, to create. Creating things is our life, really. It makes sense of our odd lives.

I love to work too, and I also work almost every night. We have dinner together, talk about our days – spent working mostly – and then split up, she to her studio, me to my office.

We rarely set food in each other’s workspace we each understand that both of us work most nights. We do not try to change one another.

Our workspaces feel like a cocoon at night, safe and quiet.

It’s dangerous for people like us to work at home because we tend to work all the time, day or not. That’s why we break off every now and then to get away for a day or go the movies. We spend weekends together, day and night.

We love being together as much or more as we love working at night, it seems we both concentrate well in the dark, there fewer chores and distractions.  But neither of us can give up night work unless we’re away.

John Updike  said you have to work during the creative hours, whenever they are. For both of us, that is often the night.

Around nine o’clock, I go out to close up the chicken coop and let the dogs out, I love to walk past her Schoolhouse Studio and hear the humming of her sewing machine and see her face in the light. She is full of focus and concentration, she doesn’t hear me or see me.

But she knows I take night photos sometimes.

I’ve figured out how to take a good night photo finally, and I loved this image of her, it is so familiar to me, all the way back to those first nights working in her new space, her new studio, which she loved so.

She always has a dog with her, then it was Frida, and now it’s Fate. Frida decided one day it would be easier to live with me than to eat me, we worked it out. I knew if I didn’t work it out with Frida, Maria would be working at night somewhere else. I couldn’t let that happen.

Fate always hears me and pops up her head in the window, Fate misses nothing.

Back then, I would leave cheese and bread for her, the plate was always empty in the morning. You treat me like a cat, she joked. You are like a cat, I said. Now, she gets a good dinner and doesn’t need bread and cheese later on. But I miss the romance of it.

I was deeply in love with her soon enough but didn’t dare show it, she seemed like a deer to me, ready to bolt in a flash. Later, I’d bring popcorn over to her, and we’d sit and talk and eat our popcorn and it was my daughter Emma who was the first person on the earth to say something was going on between us.

Shocked, I denied it and asked her what she meant: “Well, Dad, you’re out there with popcorn every night talking for hours, it’s not that hard to see what’s happening.” Yet I didn’t see it, not then, not for a while. I think I thought it was impossible to imagine our being together, I didn’t dare think about it, she gave me no reason to think such a thing could happen.

But it did.

Life seems right and proper when I see her sitting in that studio, I love her so much, I am so happy to see her working, it brings so much joy to her. Her art is her blood and soul.

The night work is a continuum for us, an odd way of connecting and supporting each other. It’s also a reminder that despite the fraying and grinding of relationships, I love her more and more each year and each day.

Something about the night and the night work has something to do with it, is all I can say.

Tomorrow I get up early and head to the Apple Store in Albany to get my Iphone X screen replaced. Then I’ll turn it on for cash as a trade-in for my new Iphone 11, which took this night photo. After that, I’ll go to Bishop Maginn and check in on things there.

See you then.

Thanks for listening.