She's Very Happy To See You

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.”

Barley, a dog, is photographed with her snoot very close to the camera, creating a fisheye lens effect such that even her ears are already slightly out of focus, and her feet appear tiny and distant. Sharing Barley with people via this visual medium doesn’t fully do justice to how tactile she is as a creature. Given the option, when not out on an adventure, Barley wants to be very close most of the time. I suspect that, at some deep level, she finds “chairs” (objects stop which humans seem to spend a lot of time perching) to be unfortunate obstacles to her quest to snuggle and/or tussle. She, of course, wants to be good, and so is responsive to demands that she not climb into nearby laps, but she does keep trying to do so, as if we’re all just a little too far away from her for her liking.

Barley, a dog, lies on her side in an office and catches a long slice of sunlight being cast through a window at a low angle. The low angle of the winter sun is mostly obnoxious for me, a computer user who is trying to minimize screen glare. However, that low angle, in concert with the deciduous trees being stripped of their leaves, also means Barley get access to some direct sunlight that are scattered and blocked during the rest of the year. Unlike her normal maneuver of curling up in her fortress of softitude, she managed to catch a few rays of the noonday sun as it swings low across the sky.

Barley, a dog, stands next to a water fountain that has a “no cell phones” symbol stuck to its side. They say that every warning sign tells a story, and I’m a little baffled by this one. Yesterday’s post, sure: people in a waiting area who are on their phones are pretty loud and obnoxious. But who is hanging out next to the water fountain as they have a phone discussion? Is there some other story being implied here? Are people… washing their phones in public? 🤔

Barley, a dog, looks at a “no cell phones” sign left on a side table in a college building’s lobby. This space has little to worry about from Barley. I’m confident that Barley can’t even conceive of telephony. Her world is very small and immediate, and (we presume) that she behaves as though the world beyond her immediate sphere may as well not exist. As such, she’s not expecting to receive any calls.

Barley, a dog, investigates a low garden wall decorated with a chaotic array of childrens’ building blocks and, behing them, varied rubber ducks. A few months after I shared Barley’s first encounter with the duck wall, I happened to be walking past when the homeowner was present, and complimented her on the ever-changing array of items she and her husband keep on display. She told me a tragic story: The members of the duck wall I had previously photographed got stolen! Apparently, they noticed some weirdo had been hanging around looking at them, and the one day they all vanished and the weirdo has since not been seen around. It seems impossible to me that there is any commercial value to loose rubber ducks, so the thief must just be an enthusiast. Fortunately, this hasn’t deterred the duck hosts from trying to add a bit of color, so a new batch of toys has since appeared, and will continue to do so.

Juniper, a tiny puppy, crouches nervously in the wet sand of a beach in a somewhat oversized harness. We had a sense of Juniper’s nervous sensibility early on. With the first month or so of adopting her as a puppy, we took a trip out to the ocean to see what she would make of it all, and she was not having it. In fairness, the surf was pretty strong that day, but even walking along the beach at some distance, Juniper seemed very unnerved by the rumbling crash of each arriving wave. We have since concluded that she likes water just fine, so long as it’s perfectly still and about ankle-deep.

Barley, a dog, lies on the futon with one of her toys, but glances with evident alarm toward something happening off campus. Barley gives me The Big Eyes all the time, but a key implication my being given The Eyes is that you see them face on. Barley’s got big, dark eyes. Even when Barley gives me her biggest puppy-dog eyes, what strikes you are these inky brown and black orbs. What I don’t usually get to see are the vivid whites of her eyes, since they only form a thin ring when you lock eyes with her. But viewed from the side, the size of her orbit becomes pretty difficult to ignore. I figure I’m not the first person to notice this about dogs, because it’s been a visual gag in cartoons since at least 1943.

Barley, a dog, stands in front of a fallen tree that, long ago, was cut. It blends into the backdrop, as if it has been here all along. Nearly a year ago, a tree fell and that portion that blocked the path needed to get excised. At the time, what impressed me was how disconcering it was to see a fallen tree with a bright cross-section. Over the last eleven months, the elements have had their way with that bright patch. Now, the fallen tree blends nicely with the backdrop, and one imagines that almost everyone walks past it without giving it a second thought. But I have not forgotten: The landscape is still changing. The level geometry is not static. The ending has not yet been written.