Barley, a dog, stares up mournfully from an expectant sit. At the edge of the frame, we see the nearly-empty bowl of popcorn from which she would dearly like a sample. It’s hard to say which foods are Barley’s favorites, since she finds just about any food to be stop-the-presses levels of interesting, but popcorn seems to hold a fascination even beyond her normal enthusiasm. Obviously, the saltiness is a big factor, but I bet the textures is also important. Not necessarily the texture in her mouth, mind. I think it’s how loudly it crunches in the mouths of others that sends her a big signal that, “Someone’s chowing down on something special, I better get in on that action!”

Barley, a dog, treads through grass. Close examination reveals that each blade of grass is coated in a thin layer of frost. One of my clearest visual signals that I’m far from home in a different part of the world is that the plants are the wrong color. There’s greenery of some kind most everywhere, but between regional variations in local species and horticultural practice, the particular shade of green can vary quite dramatically. Occasionally, my own neighborhood will play this trick on me. Leaving for work early one unseasonably cold morning and finding that a chilling fog has dusted every place with a patina of frost had me feeling like I’d woken up in a different state, or maybe even inside a black-and-white photograph hand-colored in pale, penciled hues.

Barley, a dog, sploots on a carpet with only her hindquarters in the frame of this animated GIF. After a pause, her tail begins wagging enthusiastically. Barley is very tuned into how much attention is being paid to her, and she’ll display some provisional excitement if she’s given an encouraging (but not definitive) clue that fun times are ahead. Certain words mean it’s time to hit the gas (“walk”,”eat”, and “snack” are all turbo boosters), but if she hears her name, it’s probably a pretty good sign and she’ll get the engine turning over in case there’s more good news.

Barley, a dog, advances down a college hallway lit mostly by sunlight, without any evident signs of human activity. As a medium so frequently geared toward the visual, the Internet has made much of liminality as a photographic aesthetic, particularly as it applies to places. We might say that a curiously nondescript hallway feels “uncanny” when photographed. I think this is owed in part to the fixedness of photographs: They situate the viewer in a spot and force them to remain there. In a liminal space, one we are meant to pass through, our in life has trained us to get a move on. Show me a long, empty subway tunnel and I’m going to feel the prospect of missing my connecting train in my bones. I gotta go fast, and a photograph refuses to let me do so. I think this emphasis on place is limiting. This photograph doesn’t capture the feeling of what it depicts: A college campus at the absolute nadir of its activity, deep into a Spring Break that both students and faculty are taking full advantage of. The campus doesn’t feel vacated, it feels interrupted. The potential energy of a term about to be resumed hangs over the quietude of the offices and classrooms. Even Barley can feel it, in her way, displaying the kind of restlessness that comes of having been cut off cold turkey from her steady stream of guests and visitors giving her attention. Something’s about to happen. A liminal time is…

Barley, a dog, wiggles furiously in the confines of her own home. Her feet blur with the vigor of her thrashing. YOU CAN’T STOP THE WIGGLES! WE’RE GONNA WIGGLE WHEN WE SAY IT’S WIGGLE TIME! KICK THE SKY! KICK! KICK!

Juniper, a dog, stands on a carpet and calmly examines the photographer. If you spend any time at all around Juniper, you will notice right away that she is observing. All the time. She might be watching out the window, or watching television, but if you’re a guest, she’s probably going to be observing you. Her capacity for scrutiny is bottomless, and she gives the impression she’s always cogitating hard about whatever she’s observing. Importantly, her default position toward guests isn’t territorial or grumpy, strictly. It’s just watchful, and patient.

Barley, a dog, scopes out a carefully tended flowerbed. I’ve mentioned before that Barley usually doesn’t care for flowers one way or the other, so it was weird that she took an interest in these. I suspect the flowers had nothing to do with it, however. If my hunch is correct, a cat had passed recently and Barley was keen on following its scent.

Barley, a dog, rests on the futon wearing her neon-yellow sweater. Her left leg is already free of the sweater, which remains draped over her shoulder. When it’s very cold out and Barley wears her sweater, she’s excited to come home but isn’t necessarily in a hurry to shed her garment. Often, she flops down somewhere and I gently prise one leg free of its confines. She can then hang out in it as long as she wants. When she stands up to do something else, the other loop slides off her other leg on its own and the sweater remains behind.

Barley, a dog, is very unsure of her footing on a sidewalk topped by a sheet of ice. This is a photo from a while ago, but I can’t resist sharing it before too much more time has passed. When things iced over here, Barley was not having it. Scrabbling hither and thither, she kept trying to find a surface where she had traction, only to discover that every surface was just as icy as every other. As scrabbly as she was, she still had better traction than me, and in her urgency, she basically pulled me along as I slid flat-footed along behind her. She found this terrain so unpleasant to walk on that she refused to go to the bathroom when we first went out, trying instead to drag me back home!

Barley, a dog, goes in for the strike! Barley, a dog, chomps down on her target, a plush toy in the shape of a piece of nigiri, with a smiling face on its side. Barley recently came into the possession of this very cute toy (purchased at a deep discount!) and seems very taken by it. On the one hand, I’m sure she would love some sushi. On the other hand, I’m finding that whether a toy holds her interest is very hard to predict. At one time I thought she liked toys that were more prey-like; and another, I thought she liked toys with floppy limbs. As time passes, I’m beginning to think that there may not be an organizing principle. She may simply be a dog whose taste in plushy toys comes and goes like a series of fads.

Barley, a dog, sniffs about near a tree trunk, where a wide assortment of branches have clustered. Between high winds and the occasional ice events, this winter has been pretty hard on the branches of the local trees. Perhaps this normal seasonal thinning, but I don’t recall seeing such heavy buildup of fallen branches from trees all over town in years past. Barley is only occasionally in the mood to select a branch to brandish as an outdoor prize, but these last couple months, there has almost always been a branch to hand when the mood has struck.

Barley, a dog, takes a break from scrutinizing the squirrels gathered on just the other side of the curtains and glances back at the camera. The bird feeder I have hanging above my patio recently saw a big uptick in use, perhaps because more birds using it means more birds seeing that more birds are using it, and so forth. Being picky eaters, the birds in question (sparrows, I think) have been rummaging around and knocking their less-preferred seeds to the ground, which has in turn attracted more squirrels. Barley finds these visitors mildly interesting, watching them silently from the floor or the futon. For their part, the squirrels don’t seem to notice her supervision.

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.