She's Very Happy To See You

Juniper, a dog, roots around inside her hollow cloth log to retrieve a hidden prize. Juniper doesn’t play the chase-and-thrash games with her toys that Barley does, and is generally quite delicate with them, but she loves a game of “pull the critters from the log.” The rules are simple: Someone hides some critters in the log, and then Juniper extracts them with all the haste of a parent pulling their kid out of harm’s way. After a few excited moments, the rescue is complete, and Juniper gets all wiggly and proud as she receives praise for doing such a good job. The cycle then repeats. Not that Juniper find the critters being in the log distressing or anything. Her anticipation as the critters are loaded back in for another round is palpable.

Barley, a dog, peers through the ap between two parked cars, both of which are quite thoroughly snowed in and snowed over in the dim light of an early morning. In retrospect, it looks like the town got one proper snow day this year, but at the time, it was not clear how long things were likely to remain disrupted. In the end, I elected to scrape and brush the accumulated snow drift off of my car and drive ever-so-slowly to work, and the roads fortunately never properly froze over. For her part, Barley remains confused by snow. She’s excited and intrigued to explore, but before too long seems to realize, “Hey, it’s really cold out today!” So long as there was snow on the ground, she really enjoyed going out on short walks.

Barley, a dog, snoozes on her huge bed with her caterpillar toy. Around here are multiple potted snake plants. Just before the cold snap hit, I finally got around to something I’ve been meaning to do for months: buying more Sansevieria plants. The two plants I’ve had for the last couple years were getting very long in the tooth, and seemed to be doing poorly (probably some combination of their soil being depleted and lingering root rot). So I’ve repotted two of the plants into fresh soil and added three additional plants. This will hopefully up the oxygen levels in my apartment, because as the old plants got a bit worse for wear, the air in my apartment definitely felt rather more stale.

Barley, a dog, relaxes on a futon beside a window that is illuminated brightly by snow. The resulting contrast plunges the indoor portion of the shot into deep shadow. While photographing Barley exploring the snow is straightforward, doing so from indoors is deceptively difficult with even a fairly good camera phone. It’s easy to forget how good the human eye is at adjusting between dramatically different levels of light. To make this perfectly clear: Barley is not lying in a room with the lights off. That’s a fully illuminated room! The snow just brightens everything up so much that resolving the snowy scene beyond the glass narrows the aperture so much as to reduce Barley to being merely rim-lit.

Barley, a dog, pokes about amid accumulating snow, in a patch where all the plants have recently been trimmed back very aggressively. As the snow accumulation began to make itself felt, the weather’s ominous heaviness was enhanced by the recent decision to very aggressively trim back nearly all of the greenery around all the buildings. The motivation, no doubt, is that when Spring arrives, we’ll get a ton of new, green growth that will be more pleasing to the eye than the thick tangle of crisscrossing shrubs we had before, but for the time being, the flora already had a “my least qualified family member gave me this haircut” feel to it. As much as a dusting of snow makes this that much starker, I think Barley mostly sees it as opening new frontiers. These areas were, until a few weeks ago, wholly impassable, so now she wants to follow her nose and see what mysteries this newly revealed terrain might hold.

Barley, a dog, stands on the grass in her winter fleece as snow begins to stick to the nearby paved walkway. The snow is not yet sticking to the grass. Right at the start of a snowfall, before it’s clear how big it’s going to become, it’s always the paved pedestrian paths where the snow finds its first foothold. Unable to efficiently exchange heat with the earth beneath, they chill and become receptive surfaces. At that point, you’re better off walking anywhere else, especially on grass, which resists for quite a while longer than the paths do.

Barley, a dog, is photographed up close as she lies on an office carpet near some office furniture. While Barley clearly prefers the many soft options that home provides when it comes to sleeping deeply, she would also much rather come to the office with me during daylight hours than stay put while I work from home. That said, I don’t think she has any real concept of “going to work.” Unlike Juniper, she is not a Dog With A Job. Leaving home and going to work is not, for her, a mission to undertaken. It’s an adventure. I figure she sees the office a bit like how humans see a ski lodge: A cozy (it somewhat kitschy) base of operations from which to undertake recreational excursions.

Juniper, a dog, peeks her head out of her crate with a serious-seeming expression, a bit like a moray eel emerging from its hidey hole. Unlike Barley, who uses her crate exclusively as a dark, warm, soft space in which she can snooze, Juniper treats her crate like a general-purpose refuge. She will frequently hang out in her crate, wide awake, surrounded by her many plushies, which she also makes a point to carry to “safety.” Whereas Barley’s toys remain strewn about the place when she’s not playing with them, Juniper likes for all her toys to be safe, and she dutifully brings them to her refuge when she’s not playing with them. You know what they say: If she hides in a cave with the babies she saved, that’s a moray (♫that’s a moray!♪).

Barley, a dog, chews enthusiastically at a strange-looking plastic bone while sprawled on a carpet. A while ago, a coworker gave me a bag of toys that their dog at home had either lost interest in or had never engaged with in the first place. So far, without exception, Barley has found each one I introduce to be very intriguing. This is a little surprising to me, because although she’s always excited to play with any new soft prey-shaped toys, she’s been quite a bit more selective with more rigid chew toys. My suspicion is that she can tell these toys are used, and the lingering evidence of some other dog’s attention makes these toys seem much more desirable. “Mine now!” has a low more caché when applied to things that used to belong to others.

Barley, a dog, sniffs about at the base of a properly enormous tree trunk. A curious side effect of seeing a very big tree almost every day is that it becomes a part of the landscape that one forgets to even think about. When I snapped this picture, I wasn’t thinking of the tree at all, and instead thought I might call attention to Barley’s exploratory prodding, a timid gestures that is as close as she ever really comes to digging, but when I pulled the photos back up to write captions for them, all I could think was, “Oh. Oh wow. That really is a big tree, huh?”

Barley, a dog still moist from a bath, is draped in a white towel. After weeks of muttering to myself that I should do something about it, Barley has finally received a bath and a pedicure to sculpt and blunt her alarmingly gnarly claws. Ordinarily, walking her fair share would be enough to slow her claws down, but between my workload and the very chilly weather, our walks have been shorter and more perfunctory, so them toes were getting a little bit witchy, putting various cable-knit sweaters at risk. For her part, Barley was not wild about the process, but tolerated it well enough in exchange for a drip-feed of small, tasty treats.

Barley, a dog, poses with a card from the Mysterium series of paranormal murder mystery board games. I’ve been posting the daily nonsense I get up to on my bulletin board for longer than I’ve been posting daily photos of Barley. A consequence of that is that Barley has been, in an incidental sense at least, my primary audience member. She has, without exaggeration, been present for hundreds of hours of fiddling with my collection, of finding amusing juxtapositions, and of sticking and unsticking pushpins into an increasingly crater-scarred substrate. Despite that, as in most things I do, I don’t think Barley has the least idea what I’m up to as she watches me fret and fuss. She’s just happy that I’m in her sightline, doing whatever it is I do.

Barley, a dog, takes a passing interest in a goat standing atop a wooden-spool-turned-pedestal. I remain grateful that Barley doesn’t have a well-defined concept of “tabletops.” I would struggle, I think, with owning the sort of pet that makes a habit of inhabiting or disrupting elevated surfaces, given my penchant for semi-organized clutter. Given Barley’s exceedingly ground-level understanding of the world, I find much tobe amused about her interest in, and possibly her confusion about, others who have climbed on top of things. Whether it’s me standing on a chair to fix a light bulb, or this goat having satisfied its biological imperative to get high, Barley’s reaction is generally to observe with mild bewilderment. “Whoa,” she seems to be thinking, “how’d they do that?”

Barley, a dog, makes eye contact with the camera as she wiggles on her back in some lush grass. Despite the weather still being quite cold (I need to scrape ice off of my windshield most mornings), Barley has taken once again to regular wiggles while out on our walks. This clearly doesn’t reflect any attempt on her part to cool off and beat the heat. If anything, the cold makes her a little more frenetic when on walks, so I suspect that these wiggles instead come from a place of having more energy than the pace of the walk allows her to express, and doing a little thrashing about as a way to get the blood moving. I’m very tickled by this possibility, because it would make wiggling a general-purpose temperature regulation strategy, at both temperature extremes.

Juniper, a dog, is goofy and happy while playing in the yard in the late afternoon. I’ve heard from folks that my writing about Juniper gives the impression that she isn’t an especially happy dog. While it’s certainly true that she’s moody and very much a creature of habit, I think she’s doing well and having a good time. Above all, she’s a dog who needs a job and really enjoys completing some mission objective, no matter how small. Whether it’s stepping outside for a few minutes to quickly patrol the perimeter, or fetching a toy on command, she wants to make herself useful and seems to feel very accomplished when she does so.

Barley, a dog, gives Tico the sloth an eyeful. Tico’s face has mostly been chewed off at this point. “I can’t believe Barley ate her face!” says owner who voted for the Barley Eats Toys’ Faces Party.

Barley, a dog, sits a few feet away from a sloth plushie. The scene seems entirely innocent. “Us? We just met, but I can tell we’re going to be great friends. Right, Tico? This is Tico, my new friend. Come oooon, why you keepin’ your distance? Get over here, ya big goof.”

Barley, a dog, views the photographer a little suspiciously through a clear plastic barrier, against which is wedged a copy of “The 21” (2023) by Elizabeth Rusch. My experience of bookstores has changed as I’ve grown older. As a youth, bookstores gave me a feeling of immense potential, that there was surely so much cool stuff to be discovered by someone with the wherewithal to sift through what the stacks had to offer. Today, I can’t quite shake a sort of lingering dread: “Geez, I hope someone is reading all these.” I think what’s contributed to this is the speed with which books that I think are excellent get pushed to the temporal horizon by the never-ending flood of new books being published. The firehose of Content that is generated on the Internet (much of it bad) is overwhelming but also relatively easy to step away from. A good bookstore is that firehose made manifest as literal tons of paper and cardstock, a wave that would crush you flat if it crashed upon you. I find myself dwelling on these feelings when I discover loose books out and about on my walks with Barley. In addition to the countless little libraries I find set up throughout various neighborhoods, I’ve run across my fair share of books out and about, exposed to the elements. I can only hope whoever decided this was the best way to dispose of a book at least gave it the courtesy of reading it first, because…

Barley, a dog, angles her body to get her tongue as far as she can into a glass jar of peanut butter. I don’t use peanut butter for much myself, but it’s a staple for my parents. Between my visits, they’ll get a jar down to the last dregs, then keep it at the back of the fridge as a treat for Barley to enjoy when we next make it into town. For her part, Barley has proven very adept at navigating the particular challenges of extracting food residue from a glass jar. She understood right away that it wasn’t a contained she could carry in her teeth the way she could a plastic yogurt container, so her extraction procedure relies heavily on precision tongue use and on keeping her angle of approach aligned with the where the jaw makes contact with the carpet, to keep it from rolling away.

Barley, a dog, trots past the camera, giving her a blurry appearance that contrasts with the sharp focus of the background. If Barley were a cryptid, she would almost certainly be “discovered” because of her friendly personality, and not because someone had set up wildlife cameras to monitor her movements. She would no doubt blow past them in a rush, leaving only blurry photos to confound the true believers.