She's Very Happy To See You

Barley, a dog, photographed up close as lies on her side atop her enormous dog bed. I’m very pleased with what a big success this new dog bed has been. As absurd and oversized as it is, it’s clear that Barley appreciates the opportunity it provides to really sprawl. She will still occasionally retreat to a darker venue when the room is brighter than she’d like, but I’d wager she’s now spending the vast majority of her downtime in the apartment resting and snoozing atop these gentle blue waves of fluffy softness.

Barley, a dog, walks past a series of short decorative bushes, each trimmed into an approximate rectangle, with very wide spacing between them. I’m always tickled by hedges that have been arranged in such a way that they can serve no purpose other than to be decorative. These, for example, are too short to provide privacy, and their comical spacing ensures they provide no meaningful barrier. If hedges are far enough apart that Barley can walk into your yard, they’re not keeping anything else out, either. Certainly, they’re not to my taste (and I spend enough of these posts complaining about yard aesthetics as it is), but maybe there’s an alternative explanation. Maybe, one day, a shady landscaper sold a homeowner on a scheme to have a hedge planted for just half the price.

Barley, a dog, leaps into the air to snatch a toy suspended above her. The camera’s focus has not had a chance to adjust to her sudden appearance in the frame. Barley was very intrigued by these rocks for whatever reason. It seemed to be more than a mere interest in a scent left by another passing dog, and I eventually decided to coax her away from the spot. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she had perhaps found the entrance to a mouse nest or somesuch, at which point no good was going to come of her fixating long enough to make trouble for any critters residing therein.

Barley, a dog, sniffs about at a low stony retaining wall, under the overhanging branches of a decorative spiny bush. Barley was very intrigued by these rocks for whatever reason. It seemed to be more than a mere interest in a scent left by another passing dog, and I eventually decided to coax her away from the spot. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she had perhaps found the entrance to a mouse nest or somesuch, at which point no good was going to come of her fixating long enough to make trouble for any critters residing therein.

Juniper, a dog, curls up with her plush wolf friend in a heap of blankets. As an adult dog, Juniper has a certain wrinkly softness about her that matches the blankets atop which she often curls. Whe has always had a bit more skin than she strictly needs, especially around her neck and shoulders, giving her a lot of turtleneck energy. She’s also a bit less active than she used to be, as her hips are a bit more sensitive than they used to be, and as she has become less stocky, her skin has expressed this rumpled duvet quality more and more.

Barley, a dog, springs forward in pursuit of her cow toy, her whole body as blur as her teeth make contact with their target. While I do what I can to keep Barley in reasonable shape, there isn’t currently a fenced zone where she can really break into a full sprint for any real distance. Still, I wouldn’t want her to get entirely rust, so I will throw toys for her to spring after over much shorter distances, mere tens of feet along the unobstructed paths in my apartment. This has given Barley not only practice in explosive acceleration, but also in precisely controlled deceleration. Despite her evident speed in this photo, for example, she successfully comes to a complete halt and reverses course before hitting the plants or the patio door.

Barley, a dog, moist for a third post in a row, trots down a path beside exposed earth that is visibly saturated with water. Despite enjoying the look and feel of the outdoors right after the rain, I try not to spend too much time walking Barley under those conditions. The villain the rears its head under such conditions is mud. While mulch and (to a lesser extent) grass to reasonably well at remaining walkable, bare earth that has become saturated can quickly become a micro-quagmire, giving Barley unfortunately little earthen booties. I’m not inclined to walk around with a roll of paper towels, so if her feet get mud-encrusted there’s not a ton I can do until I’m indoors somewhere, and I generally need to venture far enough into wherever I have arrived to get something to wiper her feet that she’ll end up leaving a lot of mud on the floor anyway. If we happen to be arriving at home, there’s a dedicated “mud towel” of course, but it’s just my luck that Barley’s worst run-ins with ankle-deep mud have all happened far from home, with the car being a mandatory intermediary location before I can get her feet refreshed.

Barley, a dog, still moist from being caught in the rain, ventures back out into a day at once sun-lit and soaked. As it happened, our shelter from the rain/hail storm was brief, and we were back outside mere minutes after the rain had subsided. Like a lot of sudden cloudbursts, the storm vanished as quickly as it had come, with a wash of palpable sunlight following in its wake. It’s always striking to me how vivid, shiny, and colorful the world looks immediately after a heavy rain. It’s a bit like getting to see a world coated in clear varnish, with a pleasant freshly aroma as an added bonus.

Barley, a dog, sits on a carpet and looks up expectantly at the camera. Her fur is visibly damp. “Oho, my watch says the forecast is ‘intermittent clouds,’ so I guess this hoodie will be plenty,” I thought to myself. Like a fool! Anyway, long story short, I was about four blocks from any meaningful shelter when the sky fully opened up with the sort of sudden downpour we don’t see here all that often. Then, before we had made it even halfway, the rain transitioned to fairly chunky hail. It’s the most completely the forecast has betrayed me since winter began, and Barley and I were both quite damp by the time we finally made it inside.

Barley, a dog, sniffs at the edge of slightly wild plot of front yard in which a freestanding trellis entirely encases a shrubby plant. I very much see the appeal of a freestanding trellis, but I’m always a little mystified when I see one being used for something other than acting as the substrate for some sort of vine or ivy. I wonder if maybe this was placed around this plant when it was much smaller and was first planted, in a bid to protect it? And now it has grown large enough that it is the plant that has trapped the trellis, rather than the other way around.

Barley, a dog, glances at a pair of ducks (one drake, one hen) in the distance, without showing great interest. The dramatic brush clearing that the grounds crew have been performing has made it much easier to spot when this resident mallard duo has made its return. Of course, I have no way of knowing if it’s the same duo who keeps reappearing every once in a great while, but it’s only ever the two. I like to think this pond, when it fills, becomes a romantic getaway, a secret spot to spend quality time. To my surprise, Barley has shown very little interest in the ducks over the last couple weeks, despite their being around most of the time. Somehow, the way they move just doesn’t seem to get Barley’s engine running the way, say, seeing it does when she sees a cat or a squirrel.

Juniper, a tiny puppy, is lying on a bed with an alert expression and a single ear pointing comically upward. Barley has, aside from some very minor cosmetic changes, looked the same the entire time I’ve had her. This makes going back to old photos of Juniper when she was a puppy all the more disorienting. Routine can make any aspect of life feel timeless and static, but change is always afoot, and it’s good and healthy to remind oneself of that regularly. I should probably do so more often.

Barley, a dog, sits dutifully on the futon, beside a paper shopping bag. Some recent out-of-town guests accidentally left some garments behind in their AirBnB, and no sooner has I been informed of this oversight as I received a follow-up message saying, that the AirBnB owners had left the garment in a bag on the porch, ready to be collected. (No doubt they dutifully began resetting the space for their next guest as soon as the space was vacated.) So Barley and I leapt into action and she accompanied me to perform the pickup, just in case delaying doing so cause it to walk away with some devious bystander. Barley didn’t know why we were suddenly rushing off somewhere, but she was very into the overall energy of having a mission.

Barley, a dog, trots along a footpath behind a brick building. I remain somewhat mystified by how Barley parses “where she should be headed” in her field of view. Here, for example, she is resolutely interested in following the path, and when she stops to sniff something beside the path, she doesn’t seem inclined to race off into the underbrush. But paths are of no relevance to her when they pass beside tended lawns, she sees no distinction there at all. But sometimes the underbrush calls to her and I have to keep from being pulled into some low-hanging branches. I get the impression that she has a sophisticated internal lexicon for all the various surfaces and how good or bad they are to walk upon, and I have not quite cracked the code.

Barley, a dog, relaxes on her gargantuan dog bed. A number of plants are unsettlingly close to her. Barley has never shown the least bit of interest in any of my air-freshening plants, but I recently realized that her new bed is so enormous that it’s giving her a bit of altitude over one of the plants. Probably for the best, then, that I invest in some plant elevation technology…

Barley, a dog, wags her tail while investigating near a library book return box. Every once in a while, it occurs to me that there are whole categories of experience that Barley has never had. For example, I feel quite confident that she has never once walked the stacks of a library. Now, to be clear, the public benefit of a library would certainly be lost on her, so I don’t see this as an experience gap that needs to be filled, but the broader idea that her world will, by the end of her life, be so much smaller than mine, nevertheless seems worth reflecting on.

Barley, a dog, enthusiastically chomps down on the neck of her brand new yeti plush. Since work and weather have kept me from being able to take the sorts of long walks that Barley would find stimulating, I’ve been trying to keep things fresh while indoors. Barley’s latest toy is a sort of multisensory yeti, no doubt partially inspired by the Abominable Snowmonster of Rankin/Bass fame. I figured this would be a hit with Barley because its floppy limbs give it a very dynamic, interactive feel while she tries to thrash it into submission, and also makes for an easy toy with which to play tug. Unfortunately, it has proven less durable than I had originally hoped, and has now needed to be repaired an astonishing four times in less than two weeks. Its snout did not survive this initial encounter and, as of this writing, the toy no longer has any recognizable face left at all.

Barley, a dog, peers down a concrete incline leading to a basement entrance, at the bottom of which is wooden shipping pallet. Once upon a time, I played an awful lot of video games. Although I maintain (and the evidence has borne out) that it was always absurd to assume that video games incline people toward violent behavior in ordinary life, there were nevertheless small cognitive habits that were reinforced by those virtual spaces. I still find myself, as I was in this photo, struck by an inclination to “loot the space,” to scan the surroundings for potential containers that might contain useful goodies. Nothing comes of such impulses, of course - in real life, people don’t use cartoonishly huge wooden crates to store a single candy bar, and even if they did, I don’t walk around destroying crates with a crowbar. Still, what struck me at this moment, when an inkling ancient and dusty stirred within me to go smash a wooden object to see if it contained any snacks, is that Barley is eternally engaged in a similar mission to forage for dubious goodies while outdoors, even though (under my supervision) she is almost never successful in collecting such loot.

Juniper, a dog, would love for some gentle belly rubs right now. Although Juniper is perhaps less slow to trust than Barley, she is no less cuddly and affectionate. Like her adopted sister, Juniper’s belly fur is a scant, downy layer through which a soft pink underbelly can clearly be seen. When she is lying on a soft enough surface that flipping entirely on her back is comfortable, it’s not at all uncommon for her to kick up her paws and enjoy some undercarriage scritches.

Barley, a dog, ponders deeply while upon the futon, or so it seems. While it’s probably a reflection of my professional concerns, I am unduly vexed by the impossibility of knowing what Barley is thinking about. It so often seems that she is displaying the telltale signs of “being thoughtful” and there’s just no way to know if that’s actually true or just a projection of human behavior onto the alien landscape of the canine mind. Of course, it’s possible (likely, even) that Barley experiences reflection in a more abstracted emotional form. So perhaps what I’m real recognizing here is her “being feelful.”