Juniper, a dog, sits before a fence with a tennis ball at her feet, and looks back over her shoulder at the camera. Every once in a while, Juniper will get a chance to growl and bark at Wally, the doofy golden retriever next door, as the two run back and forth along the fence at one another until one or both dogs are called back inside. But those encounters are sporadic, and days or weeks might pass without them happening to not be in their respective yards at the same time. Sometimes, Juniper can be found, sitting and watching the fence, perhaps with a ball, or perhaps with her monkey, seeming to wait and see if Wally will appear.

Barley, a dog, is on her back, wigglin’ up a storm in the grass in a sunny day. As cold and wet and muddy as the winter has been to date, Barley has clear recognized that it wouldn’t be worth it to flip and wiggle. But the day was sunny, and the grass was dry, and the spirit moved her! I promptly capture this moment, the first lawn wiggles of 2024, and then knelt down to give her belly a rub as she lay placidly in the sunlight, paws up.

Barley, a dog, battles valiantly with a giant octopus as it emerges from beneath the frame! “We rolled pell-mell into the midst of this nest of serpents, that wriggled on the platform in the waves of blood and ink. It seemed as though these slimy tentacles sprang up like the hydra’s heads. Ned Land’s harpoon, at each stroke, was plunged into the staring eyes of the cuttle fish. But my bold companion was suddenly overturned by the tentacles of a monster he had not been able to avoid.”- Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1872 English edition)

Barley, a dog, sniffs a fire hydrant, obviously pandering to the most reductive stereotypes. There’s something charming about how sincerely many dogs fulfill our most stereotyped expectations of them. This is not to say dogs have no identities of their own, of course. Ask any dog owner and they’ll list five ways in which their dog is weird. But rare is the dog whose every facet is uncanine, and unlike most of the animals we learn about as schoolchildren, dogs are very thoroughly in our lives in a way that would dispel any urban legends about their behavior. Of course most Americans believe baseless things about elephants and sharks and lions: How many Americans have lived with any of those species for any length of time? So it is that our pop-cultural understanding of Dog is fairly predictive! As expected, Barley finds fire hydrants very compelling.

Barley, a dog, lies on the ground, seeming forlorn, beside her dog bed in a heap. Barley seems to enjoy trips well enough, and she loves walks, but she always seems despondent while I am packing for a trip. It’s not clear to me why this should be: She almost always comes with me on these trips, and she’s excited again once we’re out the door. Even when I’m just packing up my normal day-to-day gear to go to work, she’s excited. But any more elaborate preparations involving suitcases and peripherals and her tub of dog accessories somehow disrupts her “home space” in a way that leaves her shadowing my every move with gloomy alarm.

Barley, a dog, peers from the hallway into an unlit classroom. The adage that you can ‘never go home again’ is oft-repeated, and I think it’s worth reflecting on. When we leave the nest to live a new life in a new place, doing so changes us, and the places we grew up change in our absence. As Tim Rogers puts it, “Places do not remember us.” But what’s even more dramatically true is that you can never go back to school again. One’s childhood, at least, has some sprawl to it, stretching over years. We rarely spend more than a handful of years in a given educational context, and education (if it’s doing anything right at all) transforms the person receiving it. So I will never again sit in a classroom as a student, not as I was. Those classrooms remain, but those classes are gone, as is the person I was and the era within which I was embedded. And something I’ve learned in that time, and continue to learn: How narrow and fleeting this sliver that is “today.”

Barley, a dog, rests her head expectantly on the arm of a sofa, with her hind legs curled up. Barley seems to be gazing intently off camera because, around the corner, there is a kitchen, and from that kitchen come a rhythmic series of sounds. Chop. Chop. Chop. The sounds of the Night Apples being prepared.

Juniper, a dog, snoozes on a nondescript sofa, her head resting on a dark gray pillow. Juniper doesn’t travel super often, but overall, she’s a pretty easy travel companion. While in the car, her main concern is being close to her humans, which the close quarters of car travel provide automatically. Walks and accommodations are a little more involved: While her desire to be good generally keeps her on the straight and narrow, it’s clear that being in unfamiliar spaces and landscapes stresses her out, especially if she needs to be left on her own for short stretches. The net result is that by day’s end, she’s usually plum tuckered out, as seen here.

Barley, a dog, stands next to a traditional residential letter box. On its unpainted metal exterior, one can clearly read the words U.S. MAIL APPROVED BY THE POSTMASTER GENERAL. One of the things I find myself reflecting on while walking Barley is that everything we encounter that humans have made, especially those objects that we encounter frequently, had to be designed. So it was that it occurred to me that I’ve been seeing these mailboxes my whole life and had never before given a moment’s thought to the phrase “approved by the Postmaster General.” I have since learned that this is the Jorolemon mailbox, a quiet triumph of design that has been in heavy use since its first manufacture in 1915. In an even more remarkably twist, Roy J. Joroleman, a postal employee himself, chose not to patent the design, instead releasing the design into the public domain. So next time you see one of these mailboxes, give a thought for some of the small heroes who made modern life a little better without trying to extract value in the process.

Barley, a dog, stands in a snowy landscape in front of a swimming pool, empty of water but half-full of snow. A sign indicates that the pool is closed. If an empty swimming pool fills with snow, is the swimming pool once again full of water?

Barley, a dog, stands below a sign saying BEWARE OF DOG. I’m sorry, what was that? You’d like me to be aware of dog? I think we can manage that.

Barley, a dog, fills the frame with her paw, revealing her pads, the fur between her toes, and nails in need of a trim. Because Barley spends so much time either outdoors or on carpeted surfaces, it’s easy to lose track of how fast her nails grow. When I saw her lying in a majestic side pose with one foot held aloft by an intervening pillow, I saw an opportunity to snap this pic. Having done so, I was confronted with the truth of the matter: I was going to need to set aside a block of time to get those nails done.

Barley, a dog, trots a fast clip, causing her ears to flap and giving the impression of having tiny wings extended from her head. Barley’s ears are delightfully soft and floppy, but my eyes don’t process movement fast enough to fully appreciate what they get up to when Barley goes hard. It is only though the magic of modern photography that I can pause and ponder this vision of Barley with wings extended, ready for takeoff.

Barley, a dog, wears a visibility sweater in snowy terrain, pulling the leash hard to advance. Barley, a dog, pulls the photographer forward. Barley, a dog, will continue to pull until temperatures improve. With unpleasantly cold temperatures last week, I figured it might warm my soul to ponder an even colder time from about a month ago. Here, we see Barley in full sled dog mode. When it’s wintry-cold out, her progress in any given direction is headstrong, as if working harder than usual just to keep her muscles warm.

Juniper, a dog, sits expectantly with her monkey in front of a television on which a documentary is playing. Juniper loves watching television, but it often gets her wound up. I’ve documented her various attempts to scare away Screen Beasts, but often it’s just a matter of things on screen being too high energy and her needing to burn that off somehow. Here, some manner of “crowd goes wild” mirth got her all wound up, so she decided to frolic a bit with her monkey (to the audible delight of those present). After a bit of hoppy, chompy nonsense, she settled back into watching the show again.

Barley, a dog, is a dark silhouette in the golden glow of a living room window. Having given it some thought, I don’t think Barley has a concept of “a house” as a discrete object. Her sense of objects appears to be limited to the practical scale of daily life: doors, sofas, windows, treats. I bring this up because this picture inspired me to ask myself the question, “Which side of this house would Barley consider the front?” And I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably a malformed question - her understanding of it wouldn’t make it past “this house.” What she certainly knows, as her enthusiastic vigilance is here revealing, is which direction to expect us from on our return.

Barley, a dog, glances up a hill through fairly thick fog on an otherwise deserted street. I really enjoy the visual aesthetic of walking through fog, but only when dressed accordingly. At the time of this photo, pretty early one morning, I was not dressed warmly enough and undertook the walk with what I can only describe as bone-chilled urgency. This gave what I would normally find to be a hazy, dreamy atmosphere a distinctly Silent Hill vibe. The mere fact that I was hurrying to my destination made it a lot easier to imagine escaping from some ambiguous pursuer, distant but not distant enough for comfort.

Barley, a dog, sleeps and dreams on a faux-marble bedspread, her head resting on a pillow wishing her a good night. I’ve made much in the past of how quiet Barley is, almost never barking except in the depths of her dreams. I’ve also made much of what a light sleeper she is. Despite many attempts over several years, I’ve never been able to digitally capture Barley’s sleep woofs… until now! The recording below took place at the precise time this photo was taken. I credit having been able to capture this rare footage to the loud air purifier that was running at the time, which no doubt masked the gentle rustling of my clothes as I turned to face her. This, unfortunately, provides the backing track to Barley’s announcements. Worry not: Once I’d captured the moment, I gently woke her. As cute as her sleep woofs are, the manner in which she vocalizes when she’s awake suggests that any dream worthy of growling and woofing was probably not a pleasant dream.

Barley, a dog, tromps across light snow in a vast, empty parking lot toward the wheel tracks of someone having pulled a u-turn in the snow. I spend so little time dealing with snow that when I spotted these circular tracks, my mind immediately conjured an image of Troubled Youth cruising around the snowscape and recklessly doing donuts in empty parking lots. I only realized later how absurdly I had misread what was probably instead a tired and cautious commuter pulling into a parking lot and turning around to avoid a mild hill that might be a little icy. Barley, by contrast, wasn’t fooled for a second - I’m 100% sure she would have stopped to sniff burned rubber reside, and these modest tire tracks didn’t warrant even a passing whiff.

Barley, a dog, turns her head and looks in the same direction as a fairly abstracted sculpture of a bear(?) made from segments of bark-bearing wood. The demands placed on yard art often push it to have very unusual combinations of attributes. It must be expressive, of course, but can’t be beloved or else it would probably stay indoors. It also needs to emphasize long-term durability over the immediate experience of viewing the work. Stop to consider how deeply weird most yard art would look in a person’s home, just as many forms of indoor art would look weird in a yard. I don’t know of any formal theory discussing these qualities, but I feel very confident that when this homeowner bought this bear(?), their first thought was not, “This looks great!” but, “This would look great in my yard!”