I first me the Yes/No dress of Maria’s about the same time we first met, about 12 years ago. She hung it outside of her first Studio, across from the big farmhouse at the first Bedlam Farm.

The yes/no dress and I go back a long way, all the way to the time Maria was in an art show I was promoting at Gardenworks in West Hebron, N.Y.

She sat up in the rafters and wouldn’t come down, another feature of her yes/no psyche; she just wasn’t sure about yes; no was safer.

The yes/no dress was neither encouraging nor inviting. Hugging her could be fatal, and that was clearly the idea.

When I first met Maria, she was sad, mostly silent, and clearly depressed. She rarely spoke and never smiled.

But I loved her more and more as we got to know one another.

Of course, we hit it off right away. That’s one good thing about being crazy; other worthy crazy people will find you.

It’s the normal ones you have to stay away from.

I read Maria right away as an artist miserable and lost because she wasn’t doing her art. I thought it was eating her alive.

She was, at the time, unhappily restoring old houses with her first husband, and I offered her the barn as a way of her getting back into her art, which she very sorely and painfully missed.

Her husband didn’t care for the idea, and my daughter thought it was a bit suspicious.

But starting life again was the furthest thing in my mind at the time, I was too busy cracking up.

At the time, we were both married to other people, and neither of us imagined we would ever get divorced. I understood the Yes/No dress to represent Maria’s ambivalence about the world.

She didn’t care for men much by then and was eager to live on her own one day; that was the first inkling I had that she was so unhappy.  She was eager to do her art even but wasn’t doing any.

I was not happy either, but it didn’t occur to me until I was over 60 that it would be possible for me to be happy. Both of us became good and fast friends, both of us were a mess.

She needed to be an artist; I could see it was tearing her up inside. When she hung the yes/no dress outside of her barn studio, I saw it as a flag, signaling her confusion and agonizing about her life. Yes or not was really the question.

A year or two, our worlds had changed.

But Maria and her dog Frieda both hated men and didn’t trust any of them. It was a problem.

We both got separated from our spouses, and in the best Calvinist sense of our lives, we stayed away from each other until we were legal. Maria is a hell-raiser on one level, but she is as honest and proper as a Mother Superior. She obeys laws and follows the rules.

My daughter was the first to sound the alarm; she said it was odd I spent so much time cooking popcorn and bringing it to Maria across the street. We both knew what odd meant.

I asked Maria to marry me every day for two years, which was problematic since we weren’t legally separated for two years.

She said no, but thanks every day. She was very polite but clearly not ready. One day I left a note on her car windshield that says “don’t worry, I’ll wait.”

Then I shocked myself by going into her studio late at night and talking dirty. I was horrified. I have never spoken dirty words like that to anyone; I didn’t even know I knew the words.

It was as if some dybbuk had crawled into my head and spouted filthy words.

I was mortified and disgusted with myself. I apologized profusely, but then I saw she wasn’t outraged. She was surprised but smiling as if to say, “well, this is interesting!” And she didn’t toss me out of the studio, which I took as a promising sun.

I grew up in New England. We didn’t talk like that there.

I honestly wasn’t sure what she would do. She was earnest about needing to live alone for a while. I was very serious about how old I was getting and how much I wanted to get her into bed legally.

It had been a long time for both of us, I guessed.

The yes/no dress was right out the window, though, swinging in the wind (on cold nights, it came inside the studio, those nails just waiting to gut the first man who got too close.

Whenever I saw it, I remembered Maria’s mercurial ambivalence bout me, me, and marriage. She’d had enough of all those things.

She very much wanted to be on her own, to prove to herself that she could take care of herself and find a way to do her art.

She even leased a grungy apartment in grungy Granville, N.Y., a few miles up the road. She spent only two nights there; I kept luring her to the farm with cheese, wine, chocolate, a wood stove, and foot massages.

She didn’t know it, but this played into me by now, scheming mind. In a brought winter, the farmhouse was almost irresistible when compared to her tiny, freezing apartment.

On snowy nights – there were many – the wine was on my side. She would often stay over rather than driving out to Granville and her ratty little apartment.

We were easy together, but beyond that, we both just loved each other. We both could see it. Each of us had been waiting for the other all of our lives.

I didn’t dare sass the yes/no dress, but I plowed right on; I had a feeling we were meant to be.

One day I decided to ask her to marry me one more time. We had hired our lawyers and preparing to do unwanted legal battles, each of us.

I had already gotten her dog Frieda to stop trying to kill me.  Frieda was almost ready to move into the main house and out of the barn. Big points for me.  Nothing made Maria want to trust me more than my getting Frieda to love me and move into the house.

I knew full well what might happen if she had to give Frieda up. They were Thelma and Louise, two man-haters fiercely protective of each other.

While Maria was at work, I went over to talk with the yes/no dress, a piece of art that frightened me from the first. “Look, I said, I love her, and I think she loves me. Please don’t get in the way.”

I got no vibe from the dress, which wasn’t exactly a warm symbol.

When Maria came home, I gave  her some wine and chocolate and said, “hey, how about we get married?”

I suggested that we have a child together until she reminded me we were too old and didn’t want to have a child. It made sense when she explained it that way. I guess I got too excited. I was and am a little crazy, after all.

I recovered quickly. “Well, what about getting married?”

“Okay,” I said. It was yes, not no.

To this day, I credit the yes/no dress with tipping her over the edge, spikes and all. It hangs outside her studio now, a little faded, bearing the full brunt of rain, snow, and sun.

The dress is no longer scary to me. Like me, the dress and I are getting older and are somewhat faded. I don’t sense the old hostility and menace.

I walked by her hanging outside the studio this morning, and I said “how are you doing,” and thanked her again for “yes,” a decade ago.

I asked her how she was holding up. I got no answer, but as I walked away, I thought I heard a whisper on the wind: “yes, for sure.” I turned back but there was silence.

These days Maria is not really a yes/no person. She says yes to love, to me, her work, the animals on the farm, her friends, her life, her plants and flowers, every snail and chick on the planet.

I suggested that one day she might want to make a “yes” quilt. She told me to mind my own business and stop telling her what to do.

Okay.

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For those who wish to know more, I wrote a book about that time, it’s called a Second Chance Dog, and I thought it would be a huge bestseller, but it wasn’t.

People liked it, though.