She's Very Happy To See You

Juniper, a dog, seems ambivalent about her unicorn-themed sleep mask, despite being cozy in a pink-and-blue fleece blanket. Juniper’s increased time around young kiddos has generally been good for her. She seems to have intuited that they are juvenile humans and seems to dote on them. She certainly tolerates a level of child goofiness and energetic play that she wouldn’t abide from grown adults. Even so, the sometimes you get the impression that even “tolerate” is pushing it a little bit.

Barley, a dog, braces herself unsteadily on her dog bed, a purple bandage visible on her leg. Here, we see Barley at her furthest out of sorts: Recovering from having had her teeth cleaned at the vet. There was a window of time during which Barley enjoyed going to the vet, and I’m persuaded that it’s getting her teeth cleaned that finally persuaded her to be nervous about the experience. She seems to really dislike the aftermath of general anesthesia: She was a groggy, wobbly mess for about six hours after I picked up her, and didn’t fully shake her medical hangover until the following day. Safe to say, I’m not going to need to worry too much about Barley becoming a recreational user of opioids.

Barley, a dog, walks daintily along the a curb, with bare earth to one side and the gutter to the other. Since I don’t post photos in chronological order, there’s no feeling that any picture constitutes any particular milestone as I’m taking it. And yet, here we are: this is the 700th BarleyPost (excluding Juniper Fridays in which Barley also appears), spanning over two calendar years. Through it all, Barley’s demeanor and temperament have remained astonishingly consistent: An enthusiastic copilot, a boisterous mute, always up for adventure so long as there’s not a thunderstorm. I hope I’ve done the various nuances of her existence justice with this kaleidoscope of fragmentary portraits.

Barley, a dog, sniffs about along the edge of a chain-link fence. Within the fence is the stump of a tree branch that grew through the chain link and became fused with it. I always get a kick out of seeing the aftermath of a tree having been allowed to become ingrown with a fence or similar structure. It’s as though someone took a few years to accidentally back their car over the mailbox, an accident unfolding over years. Then, one must imagine whatever turn of events required the branch to be cut, the briefest flicker of an ending after many years of prelude. One must assume the tree never saw it coming (which I suppose one must assume of trees in general, but the point stands).

Barley, a dog, looks back over her shoulder at the camera while standing beside a planter that reads, “The Phoenix Is Rising.” As much as I appreciate the manner in which walking Barley has made me more attentive to my surroundings, there is certainly also a degree to which I become preoccupied with trying to make fetch happen. I saw this planter and thought, “Oh, good, let me get a picture of this,” despite having no particular feeling about the resurrection of firebirds, and Barley was actively impatient to continue on with her investigations. Now, looking back at the photo, it’s as though she’s giving me “did you really need a picture of that?” exasperated kid energy. It cannot be denied that “The Patience Is Declining” isn’t nearly as upbeat a slogan for your statement garden.

Barley, a dog, leaps into action to subdue a plushie toy seal. Barley is once again a big fan of a toy I spent less than five dollars on. For all the very fancy and expensive dog toys Barley has enjoyed over the years, there really is something to be said for how much of a kick she gets out of the cheapest toys I present her with. Getting her lower incisors extracted as a preventative measure may turn out to be one of her biggest quality-of-life enhancers, in the long run, because there are so many toys (and so many hours spent playing with those toys) that got unlocked by that procedure.

Barley, an orange dog, stands besides an orange fire hydrant, with a sign in the background sporting orange lettering. I often need to remind myself that Barley is orange. I’ll tolerate certain things in the natural world being brightly colored (flowers, for instance), but when animals have high saturation, I’m automatically more suspicious. It’s not an “uh oh, is this a venemous animal?” sort of reaction, it’s more of a “aha, is this a cartoon I see before me?” sort of reaction. When I describe Barley to people, I want to say she’s “brown” or “tan” or some reasonable-color-for-a-dog-to-be. But look at her. She’s the color of a Werther’s Originals. This dog is orange.

Juniper, a dog, stands on a pier and monitors a seagull floating in the opposite corner of the frame. Birds don’t elicit quite the same territorial posture from Juniper, who seems to understand that (a) they’re just passing through and (b) they are not in the class of furbeasts who must be kept away from the homestead. Nevertheless, when a larger bird like a gull gets on her radar, she keeps an active eye to make sure there’s no funny business.

Barley, a dog, snoozes on her giant dog bed, one paw out for good measure. A non-insubstantial percentage of my photos of Barley are relatively samey photos of her sleeping, taken so that I might append them to some ongoing conversation in order to say, “Look at how sleepy my dog is right now.” I don’t think I ever had this “proof of life” instinct before I owned a smartphone, and I’m not much of a shutterbug otherwise. Barley brings out a particular sharing mood in me that I don’t feel with respect to photos of myself. “Check me out” feels distasteful and self-aggrandizing, while “check out my dog” feels worthy, even generous.

Barley, a dog, trots through grass just tall enough to brush along her undercarriage. I’m grateful to live in a part of the country that has a minimal risk of ticks, and further grateful that Barley’s fur is so short that any such troublemaker would be immediately evident. This sort of tall grass is pretty much the Barley’s ideal, because it’s tall enough to hide goodies and short enough to be easily traversed. So long as I’m vigilant about anything she might find in there (which isn’t too hard because, with my taller perspective, I can generally spot anything really troublesome before she can), I’m happy to give her the chance to explore.

Barley, a dog, is confronted with balloon numbers as big as she is spelling out “2025.” Marking the end of an academic year in the middle of the calendar year is never going to feel “natural” to me, but I think this speaks to a deeper issue I have with calendars in general. I think my brain is much more suited to thinking in terms of timespans with beginnings and endings, and much less so in terms of cycles. Part of this issue is that I like the definitiveness of an ending, but life goes on and nothing is ever over. So, we’ve got to position those milestones somehow, I suppose, even if one place along the roadside seems as good as another.

Barley, a dog, stands on a concrete loading ramp that descends into a green river. Barley remains deeply ambivalent about bodies of water. She doesn’t have any regular access to them these days, and as such seems to associate water with neither play nor with an opportunity to cool down on a hot day. Even getting her to stand still for this photo took some cajoling, because her main interest was to turn around and get back to investigating the tall, scrubby grasses growing along the river’s sandy banks.

Barley, a dog, stands beside a cluster of white flowers. It’s quite natural to imagine that, when flowers or fungus happen to form in “fairy rings,” that locals would attribute the apparent intentionality of their arrangement to the fair folk. Being much more of a city boy, myself, I tend to see flowers of any sort as a likely sign of authorial intent, even as another part of my brain recognizes how silly that is. So when I see little bursts of wildflowers like these, I figure a reasonable compromise is that this is a sign that the King of the Fairies made a slight footfall while passing through. What could be more natural?

Barley, a dog, surveils the activities of a band of squirrels through the curtains. Barley is uninterested in squirrels generally, and I find her lack of interest especially surprising when they’re very close by, just outside the patio door. You might think this is because the curtain provides a kind of visual buffer, but she’s not any more interest if the blinds are drawn. However, today was an exception, possibly because the squirrels were really giving one another trouble over what I can only imagine is a squirrel turf dispute. As the motion blur on her tail implies, she was not only attentive to these squabbles, but wanted to make sure I was aware of them as well.

Juniper, a dog, glances at the camera in a brief lapse of vigilance at the living room window. Juniper is mellowing with age, in a way that seems good for her overall anxiety levels. She still keeps attentive watch for any intruders, but she doesn’t get as bent out of shape at random passing card or dogwalkers as she used to. The stability of her routine is as important to this as anything, and her mood is generally better when she has a sense of what’s coming next.

Barley, a dog, investigates a garden patch full of fresh green growth. As promised a few posts ago, here’s the After to the ground crew’s seemingly desolate Before. Some of this was transplanted in the interim, but other shoots are fresh growth in their own right. We’ll see what this will amount to as Fall comes around again, but for this First of May, the grounds are looking pretty inviting!

Barley, a dog, snoozes on the futon as she is photographed from a low angle. It consistently amuses me to view Barley from this type of angle, because it really gives the sense that her body is an expansive landscape, stretching into the distance. When she’s walking around, she’s easily understood as a compact, stocky agent in the world, but when she sprawls like this, it’s much easier to imagine how the broad expanse of her flank could seem like an entire world to, say, an errant flea. A world, admittedly, that would be poisoned from that flea’s perspective, thanks to her monthly dose of anti-parasitic meds.

Barley, a dog, stands beside a rope swing hanging in someone’s yard in the early morning hours. Walking Barley as much as I do, I am constantly pondering how the world must look to her, and it occurs to me that she really wouldn’t have any way to conceive of “a swing.” No doubt, this just looks like another piece of yard art to her, and not a functional signifier of the presence of small children.

Barley, a dog, sniffs about in a patch of formerly overgrown greenery that has been reduced to nothing but brown mulch and stumps. As part of an aggressive landscaping strategy, the grounds crew at work have really reduced some of the green spaces to a dingy shadow of their former selves. This seems very intentional on their part, so I fully expect that as temperature continue to rise, we’re going to see a surge of new growth, just in time to impress the wave of visitors that comes with the end of Spring. That said, this is an older photo: Stay tuned for the reveal!

Barley, a dog, snoozes atop her bed-on-a-bed, curled into a ball such that all of her toes are gathered beneath her face. Now that Barley has this spacious expanse of bedding to work with, she has displayed a range of different sleep poses not commonly observed. This particular post, I suspect, isn’t normally comfortable on a stiffer surface because the underside’s shoulder blade is a bit awkward, but with so much soft support, she no doubt feels as though she is floating nearly weightless and can tuck her paws any way she pleases.