Barley, a dog, trots along contentedly in some moist grass, and does not appear to have noticed a pair of ducks (one male, one female) sitting in the grass on the opposite side of the path. There’s a ring of earth near my office that, whenever we get heavy rain for a couple days in a row, gradually fills to become a small, brackish pool about the size of a picnic blanket. A couple times a year, for the last three or four years, a pair of mallards will show up and hang out by the pool until it dries out. I have no idea if it’s the same ducks every year, perhaps stopping through as part of a migratory journey, but this pond fills in quite irregularly, so it seems like it would be a fantastic coincidence for them to always pass through at just the right time. Mallards also don’t generally form pair bonds that are stable over multiple breeding seasons, so it’s very possible that it’s been a different pair of ducks every time, and that this is simply a “nice spot for at most two ducks.” In any case, I try to steer Barley well clear of these visitors (photo ops notwithstanding) so she doesn’t scare them off. Fortunately, she’s not especially excited by birds, so even if she notices them at a distance, she’s pretty indifferent to their presence.

Barley, a dog, sniffs at the ground as she walks past a rose bush. She does not show any sign of stopping. The warm temperatures recently have had a range of effects on local yards, and those who have been putting in the work to keep their plants from wilting have been able to bank on tropical levels of growth. As usual, however, Barley’s appreciation for the floral arts remains minimal.

Juniper, a dog, stands in a fence yard, her body clearly visible in profile. A slight zigzag is visible in her tail. A detail of Juniper’s tail that photos don’t quite do justice is that it has two permanent “kinks” that give it a characteristic zigzag. She was born in a shelter with these, and they don’t give her any trouble at all. According to the shelter operators, this is fairly common in large litters (Juniper was the born the smallest of eleven puppy siblings), because when the womb gets very crowded, a few tail vertebrae can become fused at slightly arbitrary angles. When we met Juniper’s sister Kona by happenstance, we learned that Kona’s tail is fused in three places, at angles that give her a permanent corkscrew tail. They say that from crooked timber, no straight thing is ever made, but zigzag or no, Juniper’s as straight-shooting a dog as they come.

Barley, a dog, stands at the base of a telephone poll where neighbors have put up a handmade sign of a weary sloth hanging from a yellow “Slow Down” diamond. I’m a bit disturbed at the thought of what sort of motorist Barley would be. I don’t think a car would be enough for her. When her batteries are fully charge, she’s ready to go fast! She’d probably get the cheapest, gnarliest sportsbike she could and then sink three times its value into illegal mods before careening around the back streets at 150 miles per hour. Fortunately for me, Barley is not a streetracing delinquent, but is, in fact, a dog who knows nothing of horsepower.

Barley, a dog, lies like a lump on a throw cushion. It’s clear from the paw she has propped up that her nails have recently been trimmed. In French, one idiom for a hangover is “la gueule de bois” (literally, “wooden mouth”). Unrelatedly, “elle aboie” means “she barks.” So you see, I’ve devised an amusing (if somewhat ungrammatical) little pun to mark this photo of Barley’s deflated mood in the afternoon after getting her teeth cleaned and nails trimmed at the vet. Worry not: By the time night fell, she was mostly back to her old self, and the next day you couldn’t even tell she’d been out of sorts.

Barley, a dog, is out of focus in the foreground, with the waiting room of a veterinary office in the background. Barley recently went in for her regular check-up and teeth-cleaning, and these days she’s always alert and nervous when we arrive. In a way, she’s a victim of her own good health: At just about every check-up in recent memory she has maintained a spotless record, and there have been no emergencies. That means, if she’s going in, it’s pretty much always going to coincide with her teeth being cleaned, which means general anesthesia, which in turns means she both shows up hungry and gets no treats while she’s there! Add on top of that the impression she gives of really disliking the post-procedure hangover. If I brought her in more often, she’d probably get a lot more treats and leave with a lot less of a wooly brain. So it’s not hard to see why she’d be nervous in the waiting room!

Barley, a dog, trots past some tall trees in a pleasantly park-like environment. When Barley lived in Florida, there were the thickets of swamp shrubbery that, thanks to the climate, had a great deal more jungle caché than the more coniferous flora in her current home. Within days of first discovering them, she had worked out which parts of the wall of leaves would offer no resistance, and had mapped out for herself a handful of shortcuts through that underbrush. When she got zoomies and would tear around the yard, she’d charge headlong into the thicket at a handful of spots and emerge on the other side a second later having lost none of her momentum. These paths were too low and too narrow for even a child to crawl through comfortably, so I had no chance of being able to accompany her on one of those tunnel runs. I say all this because it occurs to me that this sort of slightly woodsy park is probably the closest she and I will ever get to sharing a trot off the path and through the underbrush. Given that I can’t really trust her off leash, especially if she’s happy to go where I can’t follow, I’m left to wonder about the evergreen speederbike chases she might get up to if I wasn’t there to keep her out of trouble.

Barley, a dog, trots along the base of a brand-new fence, whose overlapping boards have the yellow gleam of wood that has not yet spent much time in the sun. There’s something exciting about most “new” thing. Being in a brand new car, even a relatively modest one, feels like stepping into the hyperreality of film. A new phone or new computer has a crisp cleanness that feels full of potential. Even new furniture is a big exciting. But I’ve never felt that way about outdoor structures made of unfinished wood. This fence doesn’t so much look new to me as it looks raw. My mind slightly recoils with the precise distaste I feel for those semi-raw “bake them the rest of the way at home” loaves of bread some supermarkets will sell you. The fence is still underbaked, but not for long, if this summer sun has anything to say about it.

Barley, a dog, look plaintively through a living room window at the photographer, her paws daintily positioned on the back the sofa she is half-standing, half-sitting on. When visiting my parents, there’s routinely a to-do list of yard work they ask me to assist with, mostly involving cutting back the very highest branches of various trees using a comically long pole pruner. If there’s no one left in the house when I go outside without her, Barley often keeps anxious tabs on my movements, her paws resting on the back of the sofa as you see them here.

Juniper, a dog, happily (if sleepily) chills atop the sofa by the window, as is her want, at the edge of a wide show portraying her living room. After a hard day’s work protecting and patrolling the homestead, Juniper loves nothing more than to be with her people as they watch some light television. She is, however, only sometimes a snugglebug. Just as often, she keeps her distance and chills somewhere elevated that she can lie down and keep an eye on everyone. Be a shame to lose that high-ground advantage, after all.

Barley, a dog, trots happily alongside the curb of a street with green gardens but no sidewalks. The presence or absence of sidewalks feels very arbitrary among the streets where Barley often walks. Frome one block to the next, they end just as abruptly as they begin, sometimes only lasting a fraction of a block. Of course, traffic is very light anyway, so this doesn’t pose a particular hazard to dog walkers like myself, so long as I remain vigilant. Perhaps the reason for this inconsistency is one of the mysteries bestowed upon a person when they become a homeowner.

Barley, a dog, sniffs among some greenery. Above her someone has suspended a stormtrooper helmet from Star Wars on a branch. Word is, deer have been encroaching further and further into the surrounding neighborhoods as developers figure out ways to turn the steepest, most uneven plots of land in the area into additional homes. I presume this cinematic icon was put in the yard in the hopes of giving them pause. Much as it startled me the first time I turned the corner and saw it, it doesn’t seem to have alarmed Barley one bit. I doubt she even recognizes it as face- or head-like.

Barley, a dog, lies in the sun on a love seat, atop an incongruously vivid fleece throw depicting brightly colored lizards. Barley’s a very light shedder, and my parents don’t go too far out of their way put protections in place, but one step they always take is to tuck in a throw blanket on the sofa and loveseat, because the seat cushions aren’t well suited to getting laundered. This has revealed a pretty dramatic array of fleeces that I had never realized they owned, presumably purchased at clearance prices during some sale or another over the years.

Barley, a dog, tromps her way through a row of small white flowers in someone’s yard. As I’ve documented before, Barley is disinterested in flowers to a comical degree. They are, by far, the yard plants she finds least compelling. Ironically, this means I need to pay more attention when she’s near them, because humans do care quite a bit for the flowers in their yard, and she could do quite a bit of damage if she were given free reign to stampede through them to get at the more interesting woody shrubs that provide their backdrop.

Barley, a dog, awakens briefly from a snooze on the futon, opening an eye but otherwise remaining as she is. Her paw is propped up on a throw pillow in a way that strikes the photographer as a tad uncomfortable. In addition to setting herself down wherever when she decides it’s nap time, Barley will sometimes exhibit a slightly liquid tendency to slide down the sides of whatever she is resting on. In this instance, she started out lying atop the pillow, and only later turned her shoulder a bit to wedge her face between the pillows. Her paw merely stayed behind when she did so.

Barley, a dog, trots along an unpaved path beside of fringe of wet leaf litter. Through the sparse foliage, the reflective surface of a slow-moving river is just barely visible. Barley can swim, but is not what I would describe as a confident swimmer. She’ll happily splash around in ankle deep water on a hot day, but if compelled to swim out into open water (say, in pursuit of a thrown ball), her eyes go real wide the moment she starts dog-paddling and stay that way until she can feel the bottom again. Mind you, she’ll still swim out to where the ball is, get it, and come right back, but that overtone of panic is hard to ignore. As such, I’ve not gone out of my way to give her chances to frolic in the water. She seems much more in her element on dry land.

Juniper, a dog, sniffs curiously beneath the countertop of a kitchen where there is both a big pot of soup cooking on the stove and an Instant Pot simmering on the counter. Whereas Barley is good in the kitchen mostly because she has close to no concept that surfaces above her eyeline can harbor unseen objects, Juniper is good in the kitchen because she wants very badly to be a good girl and hasn’t been given permission to investigate. You can tell the difference because Juniper’s sniffy investigations are much more directed: She knows something is going on in the kitchen, and she has a pretty good idea where.

Barley, a dog, sleeps with her face smashed into a folded throw blanket, such that it has ended up wrapped around her face like a soft taco. I had that post from a couple days ago in mind when I happened upon this photo from a few years ago. Just in case you were harboring any suspicions that Barley was actually some sort of comfort genius, her strategy really has always been “just put me anywhere, I’ll figure something out.”

Barley, a dog, puts her face way into a stand-alone shrub, giving the impression that she has a giant green sea urchin for a head. Barley of course needs to sniff just about every free-standing landmark that’s at dog’s-eye level, since those are very likely places for interesting smells left by other dogs. Occasionally, though, she puts her head way into a shrub and leaves it there for quite a while. This invariably makes me nervous, despite it never having resulted in a bad outcome that I can recall.

Barley, a dog, sleeps with her body below the shoulder on her dog bed, her head resting on a stuffed toy, and her wrist supported by a different stuffed toy, resulting in a coincidentally perfect ergonomic arrangement. Barley is, strictly, not a tool user. There are objects that she’ll do things to, but she won’t ever use one object on another object. This extends to maintaining her comfort: She has a very hard-wired “dig and twirl” routine that she uses to soften up a surface if it’s not soft enough or too lumpy, but she has never arranged herself a comfortable nest in any more purposeful fashion. Sometimes, however, she lucks into lying down in such a way that the objects already present enhance her comfort. The level of ergonomic support she is receiving in this photo is a rare thing as it is, and is only made possible by how many of her toys I leave lying around at all times.