Barley, a dog, is tuckered right out on the office carpet. On account of the time of year, I’ve had a few late days at the office recently. Barley, of course, would prefer to be wherever I’m at, so she doesn’t seem to mind, but her expectation that “someone might stop by to say hi” keeps her in her lighter, more vigilant “nap” mode for a lot longer than she would be at home. Here, while napping with an eye and an ear on the door to monitor for visitors, she has slipped into deeper, dreamier sleep. Which tells me that at least she feels safe!

Barley, a dog, stands in front of a series of shiny metal planters containing a shrubbery and edible vegetables. Of the various residential aesthetics I come across on my walks, “farmcore” is the one I find most perplexing. I’m happy to live and let live, of course; people can go wild with their yards as far as I’m concerned. I just don’t quite get why you would want your residential garden to look like a working farm. In my admittedly limited experience, modern farms are very much working environments, full of heavy equipment, paint that needs a fresh coat, and a patina of mud spatter that folks are too busy to bother to clean off. It’s a functional environment, not a demonstrative, performative one. So what is someone performing that aesthetic looking to communicate? It makes about as much aesthetic sense to me as fashioning your yard in the style of an oil refinery or a quarry.

Barley, a dog, lies in the back seat of a car, atop a comforter spread out for her convenience. Barley is consistently excited to go for a ride. She has now, however, developed too keen a sense of which car is mine. From her perspective, anyone milling about near a car is worth investigating, and the open door itself is practically an invitation. Once in a car, her enthusiasm is a bit more ambiguous than I think it used to be. Mostly, she sprawls atop the blanket provided for her. She may have come to realize that all it takes is one quick deceleration for her to gutterball into the precipice before her.

Juniper, a dog, sits on the grass in a yard and scans her surroundings while holding a tennis ball in her mouth. Patrolling the grounds is a regular part of Juniper’s routine, and even when the weather is a little rainy, she’ll still stick her head out briefly to check on the yard and make sure everything is as it should be. Partly, this dutiful reliability stems from her deep need to be a Dog With A Job, but there is also an architectural reason for it: Unlike the front yard, which she can survey from the comfort of the living room couch, there aren’t any windows through which she can get a clear view of the back yard for various reasons. So, the only way to really be sure that the homestead is safe from invaders is to venture forth and check for herself.

Barley, a dog, gazes calmly ahead in a park setting. Barley, a dog, turns her head a bit to the right and adopts a concerned expression. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Barley become truly relaxed in an outdoor setting. Sure, she’ll calm down and rest, especially if the weather is warm or the walk has been long, but the sights, sounds, and smells of the world never entirely escape her awareness. This is very much not a state of anxiety. If she becomes nervous, Barley’s whole demeanor gets slinky and avoidant, attentive but also getting out of dodge. No, the steady sniff-cycling and the pricking of her ears at each whoosh and rustle are signs of Barley being well and truly present in these settings, a creature whose mind doesn’t wander because that’s what her legs are for.

Barley, a dog, sleeps while curled into a ball in her home crate. Barley sleeps at all times of day or night, but she clearly understands the difference between a vigilant nap and deep slumber. Once the day has wound down and she’s had her night dollop of probiotic yogurt, she knows that the show’s over and usually retires to her crate until Lights Out. Therein, she sleeps more deeply than she usually does during the day, and mumbled sleep woofs can occasionally be heard leaking out from her dreams.

Barley, a dog, sits in a driveway. Behind her, a combination motion-sensor-light-camera-speaker informs her that she is being recorded. There is something uniquely infuriating about being jump-scared so many times by the same chipper recorded voice announcing that your passage is being documented that you come to dread passing that particular house. It doesn’t matter how far across the street you are: The voice reports your detection even if you’re in the yard across the street. So, I hope it got a great look at this amazing dog, and myself as I made my own record of it, and her.

Barley, a dog, lies on a futon half-curled, her hind legs poking out from what is otherwise a pretty tight little bundle. Most dogs draw comfort from a mild feeling of pressure. This is presumably the mechanism behind the calming effects of a thundershirt, and why many dogs will lean against their owners, especially if they are feeling stressed out. For her part, Barley frequently capitalizes on this effect when presented with both horizontal and vertical soft and squishy surfaces. Here, we see her taking full advantage of the arrangement of pillows to sleep in such a way that the futon is giving her a hug.

Barley, a dog, peers at the camera through the railing of a wooden deck. Her paws poke out from under the railing. When visiting my parents, Barley mostly doesn’t take advantage of the deck to survey the world below. As widely documented on this page, she prefers to soak in the sun. The exception, however, is whenever my parents or I do some yard work. Then, she’ll post up at a spot not obstructed by a hedge and patiently survey the work being done. The pictured angle is typical - she tends to avoid letting her face touch the barrier itself. One gets that impression that as long as we remain within her line of sight, even if we’re pretty far away, she still feels like we’re all hanging out together.

Barley, a dog, snatches a thrown toy from the air as it comes almost straight down. One thing that immediately struck me when Barley first came home with us from the shelter, and remains striking even to this day, is how good she is at catching things. If she knows you’re going to throw something, you really need to chuck it to get it going past her - more likely, she’ll displace her whole body in order to interpose her face and bring the flying object to rest. And when she’s alert and paying attention? You might think she’s sitting all nice and polite, but that short fur conceals a whole chain of coiled springs.

Juniper, a puppy, lies with her upper body beneath a bed. She has twisted her body into a J shape to peer back out past the fringe of the hanging sheet. An early sign that puppy Juniper might be growing into nervous Nelliehood was how much she enjoyed wedging herself under a low bed. Sometimes, you would walk into the room to see just a single foot sticking out; other times, her whole rump would still be exposed. She ended up getting the nickname “wormshark” because she seemed really enthusiastic about belly-crawling and generally wormin’ around under that bed, as well as doing the same under a weighted blanket, while leaving distinctive bodyparts visible above the figurative water line, Jaws-like.

Barley, a dog, cranes her neck over some flowers to examine some dry mulch just beyond them. I’ve commented on this before, but I remain eternally tickled as how little Barley stops to smell the flowers. She so completely embodies the spirit of that idiom in how she lives every day of her life, and at the same time would be utterly baffled to discover that humans think flowers are worth stopping to smell.

Barley, a dog, stands on wet grass. Ahead of her, all the fallen leaves have been corralled around the trunks of leaves and lampposts, as and to the edge of the grass. I understand the liability motivation for the unending scourge of autumn leafblowing: keep the paths clear, minimize the risks of people slipping and falling. If you own a property with a lot of foot traffic, you’re playing with fire if you don’t have folks honkin’ and whonkin’ those dangerous leaves. What’s a little weirder to me is the aesthetic of leafblowing as it applies to stretches of lawn. Surely, if there is wet and muddy grass, some level of slippage is inevitable, and surely, if the paths themselves are clear, pedestrians should have a clear idea of where they are expected to walk. And yet, the standard practice in these parts is to give every tall object (tree, streetlight, fence, hedge) a halo of dead leaves and clear the grass. It’s not a small amount of extra work, so there must be a reason for it, but maybe it’s nothing more than that some people want fall to look tidy? Mysteries upon mysteries.

Barley, a dog, poses next to a display case containing “Memories of Tokyo-To” on vinyl, by 2 Mello. I have a lot of art on my walls. I think it’s important to enrich your space with symbols and imagery that you find meaningful, and that it’s worth finding a way to do this even when finances are tight; maybe even especially then. A while ago, despite being a 100% digital music person, I bought “Memories of Tokyo-To” by cohost’s own @MelloMakes on vinyl for the express purpose of having it as an artifact. I then sat on my hands because I didn’t have a good way to display it. My patient vigilance has just now been rewarded, because I got the box frame pictured here for a mere $20 in a store clearance section. I then carefully measured and cut the matte myself from a bit of scrap I’ve been hanging on to for years. All told, my long-standing appreciation for this album (which I’ve kept on regular rotation for years) and the extra effort needed to figure out how to mount it make for an object that I’m thrilled to have on my wall.

Barley, a dog, makes her way across a big green lawn. Barley likes to run, but otherwise I genuinely don’t think she finds that lawns have much to offer. Even in Florida, with a pretty large back yard at her disposal, her “circuit” for running laps involved circling around the one dense thicker of bushes and shrubs and then cutting through it at high speed. Over and over, she would burst through the underbrush, get herself turned around and in position over the course of a big arc, and then do it again. Her ideal playground, I think, would probably be a patch of pretty dense woods with a couple clearings and lots of hidey holes. Too bad I wouldn’t be able to fit all the places she would no doubt want to show me.

Barley, a dog, suns herself on a wooden deck next to her very favorite black rubber chew toy. Now that the weather is consistently cold and frequently gross, what a nice time to remember when there was as much sun as you could possibly want (and more!). Of course, not all among us are sun worshippers, but Barley certainly got her share when we last visited my parents during the last heat wave of summer. I often find myself envious of how simple Barley’s needs are: Just give her a toy that can stand up to her chomps, a supply of cool water when needed, and all the Sol juice she can drink.

Barley, a dog, flops exhaustedly on her side, resting against a stretch of cool, shady grass. I had occasion to take Barley on one of our longest walks in recent memory, a substantial meander that kept us on the move for the better part of two hours. It was neither especially warm nor especially cold, and Barley didn’t seem to be panting, but she was walking very slowly, so as I matched pace, we were down to only perhaps three tenths of an amble. Mere blocks from home, she saw this cool patch of grass and called an audible: No more, it’s flop time. Naturally, I obliged, and sat on the curb beside her. Giving her some gentle pets, I could feel the warmth of her shoulder and thigh muscles. After perhaps five or six minutes, she seemed largely restored, and we finished our journey at a moderate pace. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Barley go to sleep as enthusiastically as she did that day, hopping very purposefully onto the futon and immediately slipping into an unusually deep slumber.

Juniper, a dog, noodles around in the ankle-deep water of a kiddie pool laid out on a big, brown lawn. Juniper’s experiences with being in deep water have been almost exclusively negative. She can swim, but as soon as she can’t feel the bottom, no thank you, time to head back to shore. She does, however, really enjoy being in shallow water, especially if it doesn’t make any sudden moves. On hot days, she’s very good at keeping herself busy, staring into the glimmer of the waves she makes with her little tippy taps.

Barley, a dog, leads the way down a narrow side street. Some dogs on walks have a very clear sense that their owner is taking lead and their job is to dutifully follow. I’ve made no effort to cultivate that disposition in Barley, and as such she is often the one making forward progress. Mind you, I’m very much the one deciding which turns to make and thus where we’re going, but these are fleeting redirections. Since Barley’s main modes are “Forward!” and “Wait, that smells interesting…” I don’t know that she even realizes how little say she has in where we go. Instead, the extent to which she’s taking point or lagging behind is mainly a function of how tired she is.

Barley, a dog, looks back into a seemingly never-ending array of stairs and railings in a dense residential complex. I don’t get the impression that Barley really bothers to navigate at all. To her, it seems, the metaphor for the world wouldn’t be a map. Instead, I imagine that she sees the world more in terms of a Choose Your Own Adventure gamebook, with smell cues rather than text prompts. Frankly, I think she has a point. For one another, no matter how convoluted the architecture, I never get the impression that she feels lost.