Barley, a dog, stands and licks clean a large tub of Nancy’s yogurt. My parents have a yogurt chaser after dinner just about every night, and in so doing they go through their fair share of yogurt containers. Whenever I visit, I can count on them having one or two nearly-empty containers from the preceding week to give Barley so she can “feel included” during family dinner.

Barley, a dog, sniffs along the perimeter of a substantial treetop, now fallen to the snowy earth after bitter cold and strong winds. Invariably, trees in the area take some hits when the city gets walloped by some heavy-duty winter. Fortunately, where I live and work both seem to have adopted a “once bitten, twice shy” approach after getting hit hard in the last few years, and had arborists coming out and doing some preventative trimming before the New Year. This tree, unfortunately, was further afield and did not receive such attention.

Juniper, a dog, has a single paw before her as she gazes piercingly into the camera. When we first met Juniper and decided to rescue her, the thing that set her apart from the other young puppies in her litter was her intense, focused eye contact. Even at 14 weeks old, she was not locking eyes with her siblings, or with the other dogs from the shelter. She was interested in humans, she needed to know more about humans. To this day, she understands that the eyes are the most important part of a person to scrutinize, and if you meet her gaze you can almost feel her gears turning as she evaluates whatever it is that you’re up to.

Barley, a dog, snoozes on a futon with her face stuffed fully into a dark nook arising from two cushions and a salmon-colored plush toy. While Barley can sleep anywhere, she prefers somewhere dark when she wants to properly sleep and not merely doze. Sometimes, a blessed alignment occurs, and a place she happens to already be snoozing reveals itself to be a tiny island of dark in an otherwise lit room.

Barley, a dog, is depicted from the elbow down, standing on cracking, compacted snow. Her claws are splayed out a little. Once the powder has set and the cold fuses the top layer of snow into a crust, Barley’s locomotive style changes pretty dramatically. Rather than a stately high-steppin’ trot (of the sort she’d use amid autumn leaves), she favors a shoulders-low gremlin scrabbling (of the sort she’d use on loose gravel). This might just be more obvious than usual because the snow provides an unusual stark contrast to her dark nails, but I don’t recall an instance in which I was able to see clearly how much she was splaying her toes and really digging each of her nails into the ground for traction.

Barley, a dog, investigates a string of Xmas lights mostly just draped over some big rocks at the corner of a property. I’ll never not be amused by the combination of someone who feels sufficiently festive to decorate for some holiday or another and yet does so with the absolute minimum effort possible. Maybe make it a family affair, really divide the workload. Come on kids, lets decorate the Xmas rocks together! As a family! Remember, it’s not littering if you plug them in when you’re done!

Barley, a dog, sits amid an expanse of white powdery snow, lightly peppered with pine cones and tree needles. Traffic is hardly much of a concern during a snow storm, as the city, ever-ill-prepared, grinds to a halt for several days while what seems like a single plow makes its circuit around the major streets. Even so, walk Barley in the snow is a little nerve wracking when you lose any sign of where the curb lies. By this point, Barley understands intuitively (at least when I’m with her) that sidewalks are for walking and streets are to be crossed quickly, without lingering. My protective instincts are heightened when neither she nor I can tel where the street begins.

Barley, a dog, looks up from under a card table on which an abstract 70s-coded puzzle is in the process of being assembled. It’s probably safe to say that Barley would not have enjoyed this puzzle, had she any concept of its existence, given her limited ability to discriminate between hues. However, setting that hypothetical aside, I can report that she definitely did not appreciate it in practice either, because my parents and I would sit and stand around it, nearly still and mostly silent, in a manner that got her a little impatient. “Hey,” she would seem to be trying to say after a little while, “There are some perfectly good couches over there we could sit on together instead.”

Barley, a dog, is quite literally foreshadowed by winter’s noonday sun, far less overhead than it is behind her. It’s wild to me how low the arc of the sun gets during winter. As is implied by the title, this photo was taken within a week of the solstice, and despite having taken it right around noon, it’s still low enough to project Barley’s body as a stretched, hunched parody of itself, the sort of caricature you might expect from a kid playing with a flashlight in a darkened room.

Juniper, a dog, is glimpsed through a window lying on a deck and surveying her domain. She has brought one her toys with her to do so. Several people have independently described Juniper as “cat-like” in various respects, and an important aspect of this is her level of solitary independence. Yes, she has her moments of wanting to be close and snuggly, but she also has her own agenda and her own priorities. Who can say what inspires her to take up a shift of watching the back yard? What inspires her to rise, satisfied by a job well done, and return inside with her toy? I’ll tell you this much: She had no idea she was being observed when this photo was taken!

Barley, a dog, stands warily at the top of a staircase, peering down at the camera. Barley does not like the basement in my parents’ house, and is not wild about our being down there either. My mom tells me that when Barley first came to the house, it was not fully dogproofed and she freaked out a little when Barley went into the basement, so she attributes Barley’s hesitation to having been told she’s not allowed. That’s no doubt part of it, but even when coaxed down the stairs, she doesn’t sniff around and doesn’t relax. Instead, she retreats back up the stairs the moment you take your eyes off her. Luckily for her, she doesn’t need to sleep in the basement’s guest bedroom.

Barley, a dog, sits on the futon and watches a snowy patio through foggy glass as small birds capitalize on a pile of birdseed. Once Barley was back home from her wintry excursion (her excitement was clear when she recognized where we were), I refilled my birdfeeder and threw some extra birdseed on the ground for good measure. Over the passing hours, Barley lazily watched a whole gang of birds eagerly refuel. Even with the curtains drawn, the glass on patio door remained foggy all day (something that only ever happens when it’s way below freezing outside), and when I closed the blinds that night, I discovered that the condensation had begun to freeze to the glass along the base of the frame.

Barley, a dog, sits in an empty parking space and looks intently at an adjoining apartment building. I did not take Barley for a long walk on her record-setting day, but even so she was giving some evidence of not being thrilled. Often, I post photos of Barley sitting, and if it’s an outdoor picture, it’s almost always guaranteed that she did so because I asked her to. Barley almost never sits outdoors: She’s either running around or flopped onto the ground. This photo is a rare unprompted sit. I think she recognized that the entryway to the building we were passing would provide shelter from the wind, and was trying to signal to me that she’s really rather not continue.

Barley, a dog, trots gingerly up a hill dusted with snow and littered with fallen twigs. Full-force winter doesn’t hit Barley’s neck of the woods very often, but when it does, it always seems to do so in pretty dramatic fashion. This year, Barley got to set a new personal record. You might think, “gee, this photo doesn’t look like much of storm to me,” and I get where you’re coming from, but what the photo is failing to capture is that we’re walking in 12°F (-11°C) with gusty 30 mph (48 kph) winds. I’m quite confident it’s the coldest weather Barley’s ever encountered in her lifetime.

Barley, a dog, snoozes comfortably atop a messy, unmade bed, the evident beneficiary of its heaped comforter and scattered pillows. I don’t believe Barley understands the concept of a “made bed.” If anything, her preference is for beds to remain unmade as a matter of policy, as this gives her a more varied comfort topography into which to nestle her weary bones for a restorative nap. I wonder if, when she sees me making a bed, some part of her thinks, “…dang it.”

Barley, a dog, sniffs along the bade of a retaining wall made of rough, uneven stones. One needs to set aside appropriate time when taking Barley for a walk in an entirely new neighborhood. Any surface that (to our eye) looks like it probably would smell interesting evidently does, and as Barley’s chaperone I find my pace slowed to something a little more akin to that shuffling through a museum, observing each piece in turn.

Juniper, a dog, fully arrays herself across the pillows of a guest bed and bleps with visible exhaustion. The holidays are a stressful time! A sensitive soul like Juniper, in particular, needs to take her share of breaks during such a time. Thankfully, she’s a master of self-regulation, and when she’s had her fill of the frolicking, she makes a quiet exit and zonks out in an empty corner of the house for a bit to recharge her batteries.

Barley, a dog, is seemingly being scrutinized by a sculpture backlit by sunlight. It consists of stained glass inlaid into a piece of driftwood that give the impression of a glowing red orb floating above an abstracted tropical fish. Recently purchased from a street art fair, this sculpture of my mother’s certainly captures one’s attention. Even if the lights are on in the house, the slightest bit of sunlight will catch in that red orb and draws the eye with all the force of loan shark grabbing a businessman’s tie to get his attention.

Barley, a dog, follows a trail of moss down an inclined sidewalk. Another quality fostered by hills are very specific moss formations. Note how a channel seems to be cut right along the edge of the concrete, beyond which moss suddenly flourishes and then peters out. I speculate that this pattern is the specific result of rain runoff. The runoff is frequently enough that it prevents the moss from encroaching any further to the left, but the runoff itself has been enriched by the yards from which it has overflowed, so it also encourages moss growth. This results in a sharp boundary, whose sharpness narrows and channels the runoff. To the left, currents too strong for outgrowths to get purchase; to the right, a ridge that draws from the current as Egypt did from the flooding of the Nile.

Barley, a dog, picks her way through a hillside of large, loose rocks, peppered with dead leaves. With so many hills around where my parents live, we see an equilibrium that I simply don’t see when at home. On the one hand, there is much less reason to use leaf blowers, so there’s leaf litter around. On the other hand, when on an incline, leaves simply can’t pile up very deep, as they are easily coaxed downhill by even a light wind. This results in a lot of areas that never manage to accumulate more than a moderate dusting of leaves.