Barley, a dog, drinks from the same water dish as her golden retriever buddy. Barley, a dog, chews on one end of a very long fallen branch while her golden retriever buddy nibbles at a middle part of the branch. As best I can tell, Barley does not have a truly individualized sense of self. She is always, unavoidably, a member of the present group, and evaluates what she is doing in those terms. Her inner world does not appear to break along the lines of “What do I want?” but rather “What do we want?” A consequence of this is that most of her favorite verbs (such as “eat” and “play”) are very communal. If another dog has a toy, she is very interested in getting that toy, but more fundamentally needs a toy so she can do what the other dog is doing. As a corollary, her interest in playing with toys is largely driven by her impression that the toy is desirable to others. So far as I can tell, she does not play with toys at all when by herself, and plays with them much more excitedly when more people are around, as if to show off that she is playing. This led to some fun call-and-response with her golden retriever buddy, who is much more in his own head and doing what he wants to do. “Oh, you’re drinking water?” Barley seemed to think. “I’ll have you know that I’m the boss, so if anyone’s…

Barley, a dog, presses her collarbone down in the top of a much larger golden retriever’s head in a playful but assertive show of dominance as he lies on the ground. Barley, a dog, stands assertive over the golden retriever as he cranes his neck up to sniff at her ear. Barley had another playdate with her much younger, much larger golden retriever buddy, and I’m happy to report that the yard was much less muddy this time. No baths were strictly necessary, despite quite a bit of roughhousing. Barley is still very much asserting herself as The Boss, and while her buddy’s not strictly submissive in the general sense, they seem to have established a general understanding that Barley is, if not wiser, then definitely the older dog whose bossiness should be given due weight. They both came away from a couple of hours of very active play tired and cheerful.

Barley, a dog, gives an enthusiastic chomp to a purple llama toy. Truly one of the great paradoxes of Barley’s capacity for destroying toys is that some of her toys that have lasted the longest are really very cheap and fragile, and have survived by being both very squishy and very floppy. It’s hard to get a cheaper toy for its size than Legend The Llama, especially since I got it on sale for even cheaper than its list price! And yet it precisely because its material is so yielding and elastic that Barley doesn’t bother trying to really grind away at it with her powerful back-tooth technique. It must feel so wispy and insubstantial that she might as well be biting down on a cloud. (Also come on, PetSmart, “Llegend The Llama” was right there! Real missed naming opportunity.)

Barley, a dog, walks past a big ole’ rock just sitting on someone’s otherwise unkempt lawn. There’s something I really enjoy about a property with a naturalistic, unlandscaped look that just has a big rock sitting atop the ground somewhere. It’s very important that the rock not be submerged. If a big rock’s parly underground, it looks completely normal and natural. For a big honkin’ rock like this to be on the ground and not in it, one assumes that it was dug up from the earth at some point. Perhaps this rock was extracted when the foundation for a building on the property was being laid, for example. I’m really tickled by a “yeah, just put that anywhere” attitude applied to an object that weighs hundreds of pounds. Barley is a fan as well, but probably only in the sense that any ground level landmark is worth investigating for potential scent news.

Barley, a dog, sleeps peacefully on a futon. Her feet will wiggle gently from time to time as she dreams. I always enjoy when Barley falls asleep in this particular position relative to me, for two reasons. First, I know that if she has fallen asleep with her belly exposed, then she feels both warm and safe. Second, and more importantly, her hip and shoulder sink into the soft substrate of the futon, suspending a couple of her paws in the air. When she inevitably starts to dream, her wrists hang very loose, and the fleeting muscle contractions as she runs in her sleep get magnified into toe wiggles that are visible from across the room.

Barley, a dog, trots along an unpaved path, the ground cover consisting of dry earth, dead leaves, and ivy. When I’m given occasion to consider them, I’d say that Barley’s feet are pretty small in the grand scheme of things. Between that and her short coat, I’ve been very impressed with how rarely she seems to end up with muddy paws. To be sure, other factors contribute as well. I don’t trust her off leash, for example, so she’s not allowed to run roughshod over very muddy terrain (because I wouldn’t be willing to walk there myself). Even when conditions are wet and rainy, however, her feet just can’t sponge up much mud at all. Even if she steps in some fresh, soupy mud on a walk, the resulting paw prints only last another five or six steps before fading into obscurity. This is quite a contrast to dogs I’ve known earlier in life (who tended to have thicker/curlier coats). So Barley won’t be winning any finger/paw-painting contests, which I can’t say I’m unhappy about.

Juniper, a dog, still in her puppy era, puts a paw to her face in a manner that seems like she is feigning shock. Revisiting Juniper’s puppy photos is always slightly disconcerting. For some reason, my brain doesn’t register that puppies are young dogs in the way that I intuitively understand that children are young humans. Puppy Juniper both is and is not the moody beast I know today. She both is and is not the goofy weirdo I knew then. I recognize her, but it’s still shocking how much of a metamorphosis takes place during maturation. It shouldn’t be shocking, it’s the most natural thing in the world, but the storytelling part of my brain is so much more comfortable with pets being static and unchanging over time than it is with having known Juniper when she was this tiny. This sense of chronological uncanniness isn’t helped by our having rescued Barley just as she was finishing adolescence, meaning that she has always been within a few pounds of her current weight, making her much more plausible in my mind as an eternal, unchanging being.

Barley, a dog, sleeps peacefully on her hotel bed with her cowprint throw blanket. After an uneventful weekend in the strange world of the airport periphery, Barley and I were able to go home to an apartment in need of only mild cleaning given the heavy-duty work that had happened in our absence. She was calm and relaxed in the room, and inquisitive in the “come but don’t stay” surroundings where we took our walks. No worrying signs of stress at all. Long-time fans of Barley will remember why I was as nervous about Barley being displaced. Years ago, a flooding issue in my apartment (almost certainly related in some way to the most recent work) resulted in a living arrangement Barley found so stressful that it almost killed her. The mystery remains as to why Barley is so unhappy in some temporary spaces and is completely relaxed in others. Differences in the smells left by cleaning products? Sounds outside my human hearing range? Who can say? What’s important is that she made it through this most recent episode without further incident, and is now happily back home.

Barley, a dog, walks along the perimeter of a marking lot in a space that doesn’t seem natural, but is also devoid of signs of habitation. Every international airport has a halo of weirdly depopulated spaces. This is for many reasons. Planes require a ton of space to store and maintain. Shipping hubs require huge sorting and warehousing facilities. And most of all, housing developers aren’t going to screw their own potential property values by building within earshot of planes landing and taking off at all hours. Where there are people at all, they’re usually limited to the hotel chains and outlet malls. There are no neighborhoods in these places, no neighbors. There are few sidewalks - why would anyone be on foot in a place like this, when every hotel has a shuttle service? One of the consequences of this weird mix of heavily developed and practically unlivable is that there is so little human detritus. Walk in any normal neighborhood, even a nice one, and you’ll see some signs of humans passing through. A bit of litter, perhaps, or a flyer that came loose from someone’s front door and now wanders free with the wind. Some signs of yard work or a cheeky sign. Not in the Airport Hinterlands. I’ve never felt further from civilization while standing on concrete amid well-kept landscaping.

Barley, a dog, sniffs along a fringe of lawn next to some unnervingly bright, unnervingly bland plants in what feels like a pre-fab environment. The landscaping choices around a budget hotel near the airport always feel like they’ve been optimized to look as good as they can from about 100 years away, balanced against being able to thrive entirely under the care of an automated sprinkler system. Up close, it feels like you’re too close to the movie set and can see the artificiality of the matte painting. While the plants are alive, they have this unnerving blandness that feels slightly hostile. “No one lives here, please move along.” It’s not precisely that these landscaping choices feel liminal; their limited palette of bright colors feel aposematic. Danger: Poison, don’t bite.

Barley, a dog, has a queen-sized bed all to herself in a three-star hotel room. On my third night in the terrible motel room, I was awoken around 2am by a shouting match taking place about 40 feet from my hotel room door. The particular of the argument were not well-defined, beyond some mismatch between the amount of money Person A had offered and the number of pills Person B was willing to give them, because both parties had pre-existing beef and figured they could add more items to the agenda as they went. Needless to say, I checked out of the motel on what was to have been my final night with no intention of returning. I called to inform apartment management that I had done so (because, after all, I had been promised they I could return that day by End Of Business), and they apologized and explained that I was actually going to need to say at the motel for three additional nights because the contractors had neglected to explain that the concrete poured to fill the hole in the foundation needed to cure so the laminate flooring didn’t trap all the moisture. I stood my ground: I was not going back to the motel, and insisted that I would be making my own arrangements instead and that I expected management to compensate me at least for the amount they had been paying for the awful motel. Working this up the chain had an unexpected side effect:…

Barley, a dog, is slightly more relaxed in her awful motel room thanks to a very cheap blanket with a silly cowprint pattern. After Barley’s awful first night in the motel, I made sure she got a lot of attention and exercise the next day. On the way home from work, I also stopped by Target and bought the cheapest throw blanket I could find in the clearance section. At $25, this fetching number is very warm thanks to being made of 100% non-breathable materials, but is nevertheless somewhat breathable because of its perilously loose weave. It’s soft as the dickens, and will probably begin to disintegrate within six months. However, as nervous as Barley was to return to the Bad Room, she seemed much calmer after I swaddled her in cowprint. She was able to fall asleep while I was working, and seemed to have a much more restful night. I, by contrast, could only feel my mood darkening. I was informed that evening that the contractors were extending the work by another day, meaning a third night rolling the dice that I wouldn’t get a window smashed in.

Barley, a dog, lies nervous and vigilant on a pair of dog beds placed atop a no-frills motel bed. I recently had a decidedly unpleasant experience. After complaining about slow drains, apartment management informed me that my drain line had been broken by roots, and the only way to fix it was going to be to jackhammer a hole in the foundation under my bathroom. This meant I needed to vacate my apartment, taking refuge in a motel booked by the management team. I was initially promised that I could return to my apartment after two nights. I’m no stranger to budget accommodation, but the motel they put me up at is probably the diciest establishment I’ve stayed in overnight as an adult. It’s hardly encouraging when over 50% of the cars parked in the parking lot after dark have at least one broken window. Barley hated the room. The floor was unnervingly sticky, and Barley refused to walk around on it more than necessary. Once standing on the bed, she wouldn’t lie down until I put her dog beds atop the sheets. Even then, instead of curling up to snooze while I answered emails like she normally does, she positioned herself as you see here, ears up and eyes open wide, for several hours until I went to sleep. It didn’t help that the room was also quite cold, as the heating element in the climate control didn’t seem to function. Around 3am, I awoke to realize that Barley…

Juniper, a dog, sleeps on a person’s bed, snuggled up to a rumpled heap of throw blanket. Even now as she enters middle age, Juniper is still so baby to me, much more so than Barley. I think it’s largely to do with how dainty and sensitive she is, but she’s also very attached. She knows where home is, and who home is, and seems to draw much comfort from the intersection of the two.

Barley, a dog, walks past some red and yellow tulips, surrounded by ornamental lavender, paying none of it any mind whatsoever. A fun thing about evolution is that it’s always everything at once. Flowers, for example, need to be as visible as possible for the animals that they rely on to get pollinated, but also need to be as camouflaged as possible with respect to other animals that might do them harm in some way. I pondered this dynamic as I reflected on how nondescript a red tulip must look to Barley, just a darker blob amid the gray of the leaves. “Nothing to see here,” the flowers seem to say. “Should you need to do some recreational digging, please consider other patches in the neighborhood than this one.” (Not that this applies to the yellow tulips, which should be quite visible to her, or to any of the floral smells, which Barley is experiencing with an intensity I will never understand.)

Barley, a dog, sniffs intently along a margin of dead leaves between some grass and some shrubbery. Given the amount of rain we get through the winter months, I remain sort of fascinated by the durability of leaf litter. I don’t doubt that all sorts of good decomp is happening to the benefit of flora and fauna alike, there’s still a lot of leaves that seem not to have changed all that month. Is it more that there’s a crisped outer layer, a bit like a crème brûlée, where leaves at the top get dried out by the sun while the moisture remains in the dark layers beneath? Does this stratification hold up in the face of a season’s worth of wind gusts? I guess what I’m asking is, just how worried should I be that Barley’s going to find something truly dicey under all those leaves? 😅

Barley, a dog, writhes enthusiastically on her back on a mossy lawn amid scattered sticks and leaves. It’s still technically Spring, but we’re definitely getting our share of Summer days, and Barley is taking a lot more opportunities to give her belly its requisite dose of Vitamin D. It also helps that the grass is now much more frequently the right kind of dry to be a cool, soothing bristle brush on her back. If it’s a sunny day and there’s plenty of grass around, I can generally count on one solid wiggle per proper walk.

Barley, a dog, faces left and looks up at something out of frame. This highlights her very fetching profile. People say all kinds of things when they say hi to Barley on the street, but one of the clearest generation gaps I’ve noticed is that dog enthusiasts who are under thirty are fairly likely to praise she shape of her head. “I love your dog’s big head!” a teenager recently declared from a distance as I walked past their house. Meanwhile, dog enthusiasts over the age of thirty almost never do so. My hunch is that this reflects a stark contrast in which age cohort has a stronger prejudice against pit bulls. The kids are alright, it seems: They’ve largely seen past the dog-whistle politics that labels pitties and mutts as “dangerous” compared to expensive purebreeds. They don’t think Barley is a lovely dog in spite of looking rather pitty, but because of it. If social media has done any good thing in the last 20 years, it might have been showing a generation how sweet and goofy pitbulls are across countless photos and videos.

Barley, a dog, inspects a dummy owl that won’t be scaring away too many prey animals now that it has fallen face-down in the grass. Far from their reputation as purveyors of sagely wisdom, owls are really more like feathered guided missiles to the various animals they prey upon, so it makes sense that a dummy owl would be an effective scarecrow to its prey. I like to imagine other ‘scarecrow animals’ that one could mount in one’s yard. Perhaps one might hang a life-sized fiberglass shark from one’s balcony to chase off those pesky harbor seals. Or rig up one of those car dealershop inflatable tube guys to look like a mongoose and scare of snakes. Or maybe, maybe, get perfect replica goat to stare down your lawn so it doesn’t get any ideas.

Barley, a dog, pops her head up from lazing on the futon because the viewer is looking at her, triggering a staring contest motivated by the hope that something is about to happen. Barley very much lives among the humans in her surroundings, party to their activities. She’s not really able to “entertain herself” beyond slipping into the land of dreams. If she’s bored, she seeks you out. If you’re doing anything, she needs to keep an eye on what it is. As such, whenever it strikes me to turn and face her, she becomes quite interested. “Is something happening?” I suspect she is thinking. She would absolutely be down for something happening, pretty much all the time.