Barley, a dog, extends a pay past the edge of a throw pillow as she rests on a sofa, and her toe gently folds the corner of a magazine over on itself. I think Barley is probably a little frustrated by the amount of time I spend in office chairs. Like many dogs, she wants to be close. Not necessarily touching, but near enough that any small movements of your body will register. When I visit my parents, she will capitalize on the popularity of the living room couch as a venue, both for reading the paper and watching the news. Couches can mean snuggles, of course, but Barley’s quite happy simply to be quite near. She may stare at you for long periods of time, but don’t worry. That’s just because she loves you.

Juniper, a dog, nestles into a large throw cushion such that her front and back paws are bundled together on the cushion, while her butt pokes past its edge and rests on the couch directly. Unlike Barley, whose main rest posts are to bend into a face-covering croissant or to flop her body flat and sideways, Juniper prefers an approach that lets her paws touch. She’s he’s snuggling against you, she’s prone to putting multiple paws (sometimes all of her paws) on you to gently monitor your proximity, but on her own, she’ll just touch her own paws together instead. I’m just glad she can tell when she’s near to herself.

Barley, a dog, stands tall trying to see a little bit higher over the top of a wall made of concrete pavers where it joins an embankment built from loose stone. One of Barley’s signature moves is “I don’t understand that countertops exist.” It’s genuinely a blessing: I’ll be cooking up a tasty steak on the stove and she’ll wander into the kitchen in pursuit of that scent and then just look around like it’s a complete mystery where I’ve hidden a whole savory meal. So imagine my surprise when Barley clambered her way up this wall and started actively scanning back and forth (her head is a bit blurry because it was in motion) as if trying to see over this wall. My best guess is that there must have been some powerfully compelling scent, such as that of a cat, that was made very recently at this particular junction, and Barley’s just gotta know which way it went!

Barley, a dog, strikes a moody post as she lies comfortably in the dappled sunlight of a lazy late-summer afternoon. When relaxing with Barley indoors, her instinct is generally not only try to make eye contact, but to maintain it. Her appreciation of scritches is that much more evident when she locks eyes with you. When outdoors, however, her attention is always a bit more scattered. Often, I’ll speak to her while we’re, and as I do so, she’ll glance about, or scan the surroundings. She’s definitely not ignoring me, she’s taking in the info, but her sense of our team activity is a bit different from my sense of our conversation. The wind, I’m sure, carries a steady supply of New Clues compared to the bland steadiness of familiar indoor air, but more than that, I think it’s only on her home turf that Barley really fully relaxes.

Barley, a dog, rests on a sofa with her paws on the armrest, her head up, her ears forward, and her eyes alert. As much as Barley is a dog who lives in the moment, she certainly also lives with palpable concerns about the immediate future. Her concern when people leave is real, she can tell they are leaving, she’s knows what’s likely to happen next. Her hopes are similarly short-lived: A burst of enthusiasm when there’s a clue of looming good news. I don’t think she can project too much further into the future, though. I sometimes wish I could assure her that everything will be OK, that life will find its balance. Instead, I have to trust that she is resilient, that she’s already bounced back from so much, that she will survive.

Barley, a dog, stands calmly on a gravel path. behind her, a dirt path winds up an embankment otherwise full of greenery, and in the distance, the pilings of a tall bridge are visible, adorned with layers of colorful street art. Barley’s not nearly as muscular as she was when she first traveled cross-country, but she’s still plenty fit and plenty strong. Like a lot of distance runners, however, her legs have a bit of a stilt-like quality. The real power comes from muscles further up the leg, and she reflects their power with the cable-like thickness of the tendons in her forelimbs. Since I spend so much time watching her from behind, and up close, I don’t often get the chance to appreciate her standing tall, in profile, as she is here, and as the bridge in the background is also doing.

Barley, a dog, enters the frame from below as she pants happily while on a walk. Behind and above her, a wooded gulch extends into the distance. High above, a bridge allows a road to cross over the gulch entirely, bypassing it entirely. There’s something very appealing to me of a walking trail that passes under a very tall bridge. The sorts of bridges we have ready access to in most cities are, for completely practical reasons, rather grim places unloved by sunlight. There’s little question why such a spot would be a natural habitat for trolls. Here, by contrast, we can appreciate the simple miracles of civil engineering in the open air, in a space at once sunny and green, where the breeze is hardly affected and one can cross the road above with the feeling that it belongs to a wholly different world.

Barley, a dog, peers from a sofa through a window, her face overlaid by the reflections of blue sky and sun-dappled leaves. As disinterested as Barley is in watching yard work from the confines of a deck, she’s more motivated to do so when inside a house. This speaks to her strong sensibility that Inside Time and Outside Time are very different mental landscapes for her. My suspicion is that when she’s outside, and we’re outside, she’s thinking, “OK, we’re doing this, cool cool cool, they’re gonna come get me and we’ll hang,” whereas when we’re outside and she’s inside, her mind goes to a place of, “You’re coming back, right? You’re not going far, right?” She’s not fussy, she’s not trying to get our attention; I think she’s genuinely keeping tabs on us because she wants to know where we’re at. And should we slip out of her visual range, she’ll try to scope us out, and failing that she’ll find a good vantage point to monitor our likely path of return.

Juniper, a dog, lies in the grass on a dry, ‘resting’ lawn with her back to the camera, fussing with some small object (a ball) that is hidden from the camera’s view. Once Juniper has patrolled the perimeter and persuaded herself that all is well on the property, she will often plop herself down in a central location and hang out for a bit. If she has one of her tennis balls with her (as she often does), she may gently fuss with it a bit, although it is wholly unclear what she hopes to accomplish while doing so. As a dog who uses tennis balls as comfort objects, I have to wonder: Is she doting on it? Maybe, just maybe, she gains a sense of calm and relief from the burdens of the world by conveying to this inanimate object, in her own way, that “everything’s going to be fine.”

Barley, a dog, is slightly out of focus in the background. In the foreground, the surface of a picnic table upon which a series of commenters have written, “I like boobs,” “ME TOO,” and “We, too, love boobs.” I heard you thought this needed to be brought to a vote, but take a look: My ‘ayes’ are down here.

Barley, a dog, stands beside a wooden bench, painted green, beside a gravel path that has dense greenery encroaching upon it from all sides. There’s something very funny to me about parks conceived of after the fact, stitched together from land ill-suited for other uses. Such zones can vary a lot, from vast, featureless expanses of grass atop sealed landfills, to narrow, gerrymandered squiggles that trace the length of some natural ravine. This park is the latter sort, and as such has a single, unforking path that runs its length. The point, of course, is to provide a green space for people to enjoy, but there are really only two appropriate activities here: Wait or Proceed. This gives the path a feeling of purpose - someone must have cleared a path through this wilderness for a reason, so surely we must be going somewhere - but there is no destination of note at either end. It’s a paradoxical space, at once liminal and not, in which the only way to fully engage is to do nothing, because to do the only other thing available is to gradually depart, whether by taking the short way out or the long way.

Barley, a dog, lies on a raised deck and rests her head on its railing, giving the impression that she’s behind bars. When I visit my parents, there are inevitably a few bits of yard work that they’ve put off dealing with until someone Young And Strong (for certain values of both words) is available to help. While I’m pitching in, Barley will keep an eye on things from the deck, but it would be a stretch to say that she looks on with interest. Instead, unless some new person walks onto the property, she seems to zone out completely. As much as she enjoys a good sun basking, I suspect she’s otherwise not that big a fan of the deck, and mostly considers her time looking on as a dull interlude during which she has to wait in a corale that is altogether too far away from the rest of us, while we get to do inscrutable things down where all the interesting smells can be found.

Barley, a dog, sniffs with great intensity under a bench cut from a single thick log, in a park-like setting. Next to her is a big red chair. When Barley got her wish and made it to the big wooden bench mentioned yesterday, she certainly didn’t seem disappointed. On the contrary, she started sniffing hither and thither, spending a long time sniffing around under the bench. So far as I can tell, she never found anything, but her enthusiasm was sustained. Eventually, she started sniffing in a somewhat wider radius, and we made our way elsewhere. On the basis of this experience, I suspect (although this is pure speculation) that her initial desire to approach this specific location may have been because she caught the scent of a cat. If a stray cat had previously taken shelter under this bench (say, the night before), perhaps what Barley was so intently snuffling was a lingering feline afterscent.

Barley, a dog, makes her way through a park-like setting, and is particularly keen to approach a big red chair and a bench at the edge of the frame. With sunny summer weather comes the opportunity to take Barley on longer, more meandering walks, and I’ll often simply let Barley decide on our direction of travel for stretches of time (within reason). Given this latitude, she will sometimes pick a heading and pursue it with alarming vigor, as if she’s sighted some distant landmark, only to sort of lose steam after a couple hundred feet. I presume, in those cases, she’s following some scent on the wind that I’ll never know about. On the other hand, in the scenario here depicted, her target was very obviously visual. She really wanted to go check out this bench.

Barley, a dog, is curled up and sleeping on a bedspread of tumultuous blues and whites. This particular bedspread always gives me the impression of a stormy sea, with its Jackson-Pollock-dribbles of white transformed into whitecaps by the lumpy loftiness of the underlying duvet. Barley, curled up and comfy, and having sunk into that softness just a bit, seems all the world like the one steady atoll amid the chaos. Or at least, she does until the dreams come, and with them the sleep woofs and leg wiggles.

Juniper, a dog, lies on the grass with her head and shoulders in the shade of a mesh sun chair. She looks up at the camera, as a tennis ball rests between her elbows. Juniper is not a fan of playing tug. Nevertheless, she has a well-developed sense of “this is mine at the moment,” and is a little fussy about this sense of ownership. If teased with threats to take the object away, she has the opposite of Barley’s response - instead of flaunting the object defiantly, she slinks off with the object to some place she won’t be bothered so much. I suspect this is why so many of her toys make their way into her crate. Best way to keep her treasures safe, after all.

Barley, a dog, slumps her body against the backrest of a couch in order to look out a window, in effect lying down and sitting up at the same time. When someone leaves, Barley likes to keep tabs on their last known vector, as if she knows it’s also their most likely angle of approach. If you leave her in a car, for example, she’ll stay in the backseat if you walk away from the trunk side, but you’ll find her waiting in the front seat if you walk away from the car’s front half. So it is in the home: She notes each departure, and while she’s not glued to the window, she’ll gravitate back to the scene of her last sighting if nothing else is going on. This points to a rare source of inner conflict: She wants to be near where people are, but she also wants to keep an eye for the return of the departed, and she’ll sometimes commit to one location for a while, then meander back to the other. More often, she’ll try to split the difference, posting up in the spot that keeps her at least within earshot of nearby humans but lets her put eyes on returning folks as soon as they arrive.

Barley, a dog, stands in front of a bizarre terraced yard made from concrete and bare earth that extends up and out of frame. This time, there is a handrail. Here we are, over a year later, and I am no closer to understanding the ziggurat yard. The earth along the road and back-filling the tiers are still bare earth, home to only tiny weeds that are still too small to have drawn the ire of whatever dark will has decided that this will be a monument to the inanimate, an edifice of desolate order. However, it now has a handrail. This was not part of the original design, and close examination reveals that it is being held in place by simple concrete screws that were sunk after the fact. To me, this exactly the same flavor of environmental storytelling as a sign in a shop forbidding some weirdly specific behavior: It’s a clue to a story that unfolded in the interim. For her part, Barley could not be less interested in these scaled-up LEGOs. Nothing here piqued her interest as even being worthy of a sniff. I had to cajole her to stay put while I took the photo, because she was eager to move on to (both literally and figuratively) greener pastures.

Barley, a dog, makes her way through an area of brown, desiccated grass, running from one edge of the frame to the other. It took me far longer than I care to admit to understand that dormant grass isn’t “dead” grass that “comes back to life” with the rain. It’s such a striking transformation in color and texture that the temptation to frame the change in terms of life or death comes strong, and in casual conversation it doesn’t feel like a meaningful distinction. As I’ve grown older, I increasingly see the capacity grass has to roll with the seasonal punches as a distinct and remarkable superpower. Imagine finding a long-forgotten, shriveled mummy behind a wall in your house, giving them a couple of gallons of water and some granola bars, and having the person fill back out and wake up as if they’d simply been hibernating.

Barley, a dog, lies contentedly on a sofa, panting in such a way as to give a big smile. There are a bunch of distinctly canine behaviors that Barley doesn’t exhibit very strongly. For example, she doesn’t engage in any herding behaviors. Still, there are little clues that hint at her inner desires. After all, the thing that vexes a lot of dogs with a strong herding instinct is when people disperse - they like for everyone to be hanging out in the same place. Barley never puts up a fuss when people go their separate ways, but it’s clear that people coming together is one of her favorite things. She loves when guests come over, she loves it when folks are in my office for meetings, she loves running up to and joining a group. Here, we see her pleased as punch at the end of a long drive, getting to sit on the sofa with my and my parents while we all catch up.