Barley, a dog, stands somewhat elevated atop the end of a garden wall, looking at the world beyond as she gives her snoot a big lick. People, as a rule, are nice to dogs and are nice about dogs when speaking to their owners. Barley receives a steady stream of praise over the course of her many human interactions in a given week, and a part of me always reacts to this by thinking, “I bet you say that to/about all the dogs.” Even so, and even given my considerable bias, I can’t help but feel that Barley is an exemplary mutt, canine beyond expectation, a real dog’s dog. In this, I’m exceptionally lucky that, in most of the ways that matter, the exceptions to this characterization are eccentricities that make Barley easier to take to work than most dogs. So, another part of me always thinks, “Yeah! This is a very good dog!”

Barley, a dog, sits at a window wearing her harness and watches someone leaving the house with evident concern. Like most dogs Barley is unnerved by humans performing the Pre-Travel Ritual. Packing up clothes? Putting things in suitcases? This is weird behavior and a deviation from routine. See, me getting my backpack ready to go is an everyday affair, and Barley gets excited because she knows we are going to work together when I do so. Suitcases are different. Even though she comes with my on pretty much every trip I take in which I pack a suitcase, that’s rare, and most dogs don’t like rare events. This usually culminates in a period of active concern while the car is being loaded, since that requires a series of departures and returns that Barley does not get to participate in. We see her here, dressed for the trip, clearly feeling the need to keep a close eye on luggage-packing events as they unfold.

Barley, a dog, lies on her side on the futon, with one paw up toward the camera and a spaced out, sleepy smile on her face. Barley finds plenty of time each day to relax, and in an environment where she feels comfortable, she’ll often do so in a legs-to-the-side, belly-out orientation. Under such conditions, she is always grateful to a human who approaches her calmly and gives her entire undercarriage a gentle massage. This is especially true if she has recently had a bit of a workout, in which case a massage to her abdominals and pectoral muscles is much appreciated.

Barley, a dog, clambers up a steep earthen embankment that is held together by a web of surface ivy so tight that the underlying soil is invisible. In the eyes of frugally-minded property developers, the beauty of surface ivy is two-fold. On the one hand, it requires basically no maintenance beyond a quick pass along its perimeter with an edger from time to time, and on the other hand, its criss-crossing woody mesh beneath the greenery acts as a self-sustaining retaining structure for steep earthen slopes. No need to use an earth mover to level things out, or to build terraced planters. Just let the ivy hold it together and the wall will stay put even in torrential rain. In Barley’s eyes, however, these steep ivy slopes hold a different beauty: A substrate to which her paws and claws are perfectly suited for hopping up to higher altitude and scampering about. There’s no better surface for Barley to have an easy time changing altitude.

Barley, a dog, walks happily along the street on a sunlit day, looking enthusiastically at the camera. During the initial minutes of a walk, Barley shows an intense enthusiasm to get out there and collate some fresh data. It feels like a race, and she doesn’t key into the person walking her very much. Once she’s settled into a good walking pace, especially if it’s a walk that is covering more ground, she becomes a much more interactive presence, keeping an eye on you as much as she is on the surroundings. Once she gets into this mode, she really likes being addressed and praised as she walks, trotting along with a little extra wag in her tail.

Juniper, a dog, rears up on her hind legs to bark at an elevated television that depicts two small children playing with a puppy. Juniper’s quest to banish screen beasts is not limited to the sort of adult animals that might pose a risk to her people. She’ll just as enthusiastically throw down the gauntlet when presented with literal puppies. Be they tiny and bumbling or looming and monstrous, Juniper will always let the house know when a furry interloper has sullied one of her beloved screens.

Barley, a dog, sniffs about in a thicket of bushy plants consisting of at least five distinct species, all so densely interwoven that anything beneath them is wholly concealed. I’m very sensitive about eye stuff. Nothing in a film makes me squirm like someone’s eye getting messed with, and I go to great lengths to keep my own eyes shielded from harm. This makes Barley’s face-first approach the world all the most remarkable to me. It’s clear to me that her eyes are simply made of sterner stuff than mine. Sure, she’s got beefy eyelids to protect herself, and she can always proceed by smell alone if her eyes need to stay closed, but she still brushes the wet surface of her eyeballs against stuff just about every day as she goes about her routine, and never seems even a little bothered by it. Faced with this sort of thick, interlocking foliage, she’ll just put her whole face in and root around in a way I certainly couldn’t get away with unless I used eye protection. It makes me wonder to what extent this is something dogs simply learn to put up with, as well as how much of it is simply that dogs are built different.

Barley, a dog, looks expectantly at a camera positioned above her head. In the left of frame, a bowl of potato chips sits on a tabletop. Barley would clearly like the photographer to share. As I while away the hours getting work done, I’ll often have some sort of snack that I’m chipping away at. I will usually share a tiny bit of whatever I’m eating with Barley, so long as it’s dog-safe; For example, she might get a quarter of a chip once or twice. So once she hears me eating anything, she will post up and begin her vigil. To her credit, she’s generally reasonable in her demands, mostly positioning herself so she’s within my eye line and waiting. At the limit, she might sometimes rest her head on my leg, but she’s never any pushier than that, so I don’t mind indulging her.

Barley, a dog, walks along a very concrete sidewalk, alongside a very concrete garden wall, topped by the posts of a very plastic fence. A handful of plants do their best to retake the landscape, but have a long way to go. Roundabouts Barley’s usual haunts, new residential construction is pretty unusual. Sure, people renovate all the time, but it’s pretty rare for a property to be stripped to zero with a new structure built from the foundation up. Whenever I come across such a brand-new house, what always strikes me is how fake and cheap the results look, not just for the house itself, but also for the yard, which is always populated by meager, undersized plants and unnervingly uniform building materials. Presumably, that’s how all houses start: No one’s going to invest money in “aging” the appearance of their property artificially when a couple of seasons of the weather and the wilds will do that for free. Nevertheless, the effect of that readymade blandness has on me is pretty visceral. I don’t think I would enjoy walking Barley in a suburban housing development.

Barley, a dog, turns to the camera. In the background, a bit out of focus, are a gathering of varied rubber ducks atop a garden wall. It has often been remarked that Barley’s indoor persona is very different from her outdoor persona. Usually, people bring this up to contrast her headstrong, willful behavior when outdoors with her more gentle, snoozy, playful personality when indoors. It recently occurred to me that Barley very rarely plays with outdoor objects in a way that resembles her play with indoor objects. The nearest instance to this that comes to mind is chewing on sticks, but when it comes to objects that resemble her indoors toys (be it plushy or rubbery), she ignores them entirely while out and about. She seemed quite perplexed, for example, when I interrupted our walk to take this picture.

Barley, a dog, looks plaintively at the camera as she lies in front of her battered but enduring seahorse toy, Stella. Barley’s toy Stella (or should I say Stellas, because there are three total in circulation) remains a favorite after quite a few years of heavy use. Sure, excised all of extra bits (fins, ears, etc.) in short order, so she is perhaps a bit less seahorse and a bit more worm, but this suits Barley’s style of play. She is, after all, quite naturally tuggable, with some floppy extremity or another readily available to be grabbed. Happily, this seemed to be a sustainable mode of play, since my main style is to make a half-hearted attempt at grabbing the toy and then almost immediately letting her win, with the occasional interjected “drop it!” to get her to give it up. These seem to be within the fabric’s tolerances.

Barley, a dog, trots through grass that is garnished with a very light sprinkling of very small dead leaves. While there’s no question that the seasons have changed, I’m fortunate that the Rainy Season here is not, in fact, a solid wall of rain. We routinely have days, even weeks, with little to no rain, and rarely do things get so chilly that a longer walk is truly unpleasant. Given Barley’s irrepressible spirit and hunger for adventure, I suspect she would do a lot less well in a climate with a deep, sustained winter that would force her to keep her walks short for months at a time. Then again, maybe she would be a big fan of the Toasty status achieved by donning full doggy winter gear.

Juniper, a dog, stands with two paws on the dock and two paws on dry land in the late afternoon, and watches with dutiful attention as a seagull flies over the water. Juniper happened to be standing near the water, as this bird came over the trees, and she perked right up as it approached. She didn’t bark, or scramble. She tracked it calmly as it came low over the water, and once it had made its water landing, the trotted out to the end of the pier and gazed at it for a while longer before making her way back to land, seemingly contented that she had a handle on the situation.

Barley, a dog, looks expectantly at someone off camera as she lies on the floor. Between her and this unseen person, her blue chewtoy lies. Barley certainly makes a distinction between “guest” and “cohabitant.” She will get very excited whenever anyone comes home, of course, but she’ll run and get a toy to show a guest, whereas her inclination is instead to try to get snuggles and pets from her cohabitants when they return. Things settle down after a while, of course, and Barley will often chew on her toy while guests are around, but eventually she’ll relax enough to snooze. But even then, when the guests stand up and start moving around, Barley re-activates, as if judging whether she needs to grab her toy and resume parading it around. You know, in case someone else goes for it.

Barley, a dog, trots along a dewy verge a bit after sunrise, the sun illuminating the clouds but still leaving the neighborhood in shadow. One of the things I’ll miss for the rest of the rainy season is the damp chill of the morning dew, something that is welcome precisely because it is temporary. Having passed from time to time through part of the country that remain bone-dry for weeks or months at a time, I’ve experienced the patina that comes to coat every outdoor surface over time. Slide your hand along any such surface and it’s like you’ve touched a piece of jeweler’s sandpaper - a slightly, subtle tooth, a resistance, as your skin travels across it. In places with enough temperature swing, and enough humidity, for a morning dew to form and then burn off, this patina never materializes. Of course, it’s not a problem during the rainy season, either, but rain’s a bit overkill when it comes to just keeping the surfaces fresh.

Barley, a dog, investigates a pile of CDs discarded next to the sidewalk. Atop the pile is a CD entitled The Essential Dolly Parton. My walks with Barley take me hither and thither, but the neighborhoods don’t change all that much, or at least, not all that quickly. What does change pretty rapidly is the detritus at street level. I suppose that much closer to Barley’s experience of the neighborhood than mine, since I don’t imagine she’s she’s spending terribly much time taking in the architecture. Even so, as grounded as Barley is, I don’t imagine she has the perspective to recognize America’s favorite book lady as essential, any more than whoever tossed these CDs out of their car window.

Barley, a dog, sploots on a sofa in a living room, once upon a night-time. Her paws rest upon the arm rest, and upon her paws, a blue chew toy. Barley rests her head on her paws, and on the toy, as she closes her eyes to snooze. As much as Barley’s attitude toward her toys is that they are an outlet for a bit of the old grab-and-thrash, she occasionally seems to display a kind of, if not affection, then at least attachment to them. Some of this is, doubtless, a consequence of me reading into things, but given the array of opportunities she has to snooze, she sure does seem to fall asleep on top of her toys pretty often, even if they’re the harder, lumpier ones. My hunch is that she likes to drift off with their smell near her nose, the better to feel that she’s in a safe place.

Barley, a dog, stands on the terrace of a brewery, seeming uncharacteristically tiny amid the stools and standing-height tables. I had the occasion to have lunch with someone I’ve not seen in a while recently, and this was an opportunity for them to get to see Barley as well, so who am I to deny someone that opportunity? That said, I only rarely bring Barley to restaurants, despite there being many dog-friendly options in the area. Since Barley readily befriends all she meets, and does so doubly with people who have food, my only real options are (1) to get a table as far from other people as possible in a restaurant with few patrons, or (2) to keep her on a very, very short leash and eat my meal with one hand. I was able to do the former in this case, so it all worked out. Even so, with the turning of the weather, I think this may be Barley’s last visit to an eatery before Spring.

Barley, a dog, chews a bully stick while facing away from the camera. Her legs are tucked under her body in an even more ridiculous pose than usual. Few gifts get Barley as excited as a bully stick. Normally a very fast eater, this tasty morsel is a meal that puts up a fight, and disappears into a kind of trance of chomping and repositioning it with her paws until every last bit is gone. Since this usually takes takes her a while (this one lasted almost ten minutes!), it stands to reason that she would need to lie down, but it seems in this case that she was in such a hurry to get down to business that she didn’t bother to lie down properly. She just sort of let her knees buckled awkwardly and stayed that way for the duration of the experience.

Juniper, a dog, holds her toy monkey in her mouth and parades it past a large window that has a view of the yard beyond. Juniper’s behavior with her stuffed toys has always come across as much more motivated by companionship and caretaking than Barley’s approach (which has quite a bit more of a RIP AND TEAR enthusiasm). It feels plausible to me that Juniper has projected some parental feelings onto her toys, carrying then by the scruff but otherwise being very gentle and snuggly with them. It amuses me to imagine that she might be bringing her monkey along on one of her window patrols not merely as a comfort object, but in the hopes of mentoring it in the ways of vigilance.