Barley, a dog, is lying on her back on the futon, gently smiling at the camera. The photo is rotated 90 degrees from real, and Barley’s pose bears a striking resemblance to a young woman doing a flirtatious hair flip. I’m normally a stickler for keeping photos oriented with respect to True Down, but my camera got confused when I took this photo and didn’t rotate the frame. I’m so pleased with how this photo looks in portrait mode that I’ve chosen not to correct it. I’m not sure what the ad agency she’s working for is trying to get me to buy, but it’s working!

Barley, a dog, glances up while on a walk, and the low angle of the setting sun casts a shadow long enough that it extends longer than Barley’s body length, and out of the shot’s frame. Barley’s main walks of the day ordinarily take place in the morning and early afternoon, but these summer months have a way of leaving my circadian rhythm a little disoriented. As such, I’ve been taking Barley on more evening walks than usual, and I’m not used to these long shadows being associated with such warm weather. In the context of my routine, long shadows are a winter phenomenon, and I found myself wondering, “Why don’t I feel more cold?” until I finally figured it out.

Barley, a dog, is wiggling on the futon! She wiggles to the left! Barley wiggles to the right! Barley wiggles all around! Barley pauses on her back to look at the photographer, as if to say, “Wait, were you watching all that?” With summer comes the peak of Barley’s need to wiggle. On the one hand, the sun’s rays can leave her noodle feeling a bit cooked, and a thorough wiggle in a shady patch of lush grass seems to help cool her down. On the other hand, with much less rain than she experiences during the rest of the year, I get the impression that her skins gets a tiny bit more itchy, in which case a drier patch of grass, or indeed the futon itself, can provide a bit of relief. The wiggles themselves seem to come upon her like a fugue state, and she comes out of a wiggle with a weird eye-contact-making intensity, as if she’s trying to see if she missed anything while she was out.

Barley, a dog, scrabbles up a big pile of mulch, sniffing with eager interest. Barley’s a big fan of mulch (as are we all). For starters, she’s not wild about getting her feet wet, and even during the rainy season, mulch is at once absorbant and relatively non-compressible, leaving her feet drier in the rain than when walking on grass or pavement. It also seems to be consistently interesting to sniff, perhaps because its absorbency helps keep recent scents aromatic for longer. I’d wager it’s a close second to decorative ivy for “ground covering Barley is most likely to venture out onto if given the chance.”

Barley, a dog, sticks her tongue in the mouth of an alligator-shaped rubber chew toy that has enzymatic dog toothpaste spread among its teeth. Barley doesn’t abide having her teeth brushed particularly well. She doesn’t get nasty about it, but she will keep her mouth closed and her jaw clenched in a way that makes getting at the inner surfaces feel pretty precarious. As such, part of her dental hygiene routine is to be given semi-regular time with toys that are designed to have toothpaste for dogs put inside them, to be accessed by a lot of chewing and licking. I’m very tickled by my most recent of these toys, which is both gator-shaped and gator-colored, because Barley was at one time a University of Florida dog.

Juniper, a dog, lies on her back on her huge dog bed, itself on a big queen-sized mattress in a guest bedroom. It’s possible that part of Juniper’s moodiness owes to her having some mild joint issues. They’re typical for her breed, and she doesn’t appear to be in active discomfort most of the time, but she’s a real sucker for warmth and softness in a way that makes me think she would love the chance to float weightlessly from time to time, freed if only for a moment from the inevitability of Earth.

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.