Barley, a dog, looks back at the photographer, who is more concerned with capturing a waist-high cube-shaped hedge. There’s something perverse, I find, in planting a hedge and meticulously keeping it trimmed into shape made of right angles. Now, if the hedge forms a wall, I can understand where they’re are coming from - it’s nicer to look at than a sun-bleached fence. But to cube a hedge at a meter a side: That almost feels like a move by someone who secretly hates hedges.

Barley, a dog, peeks over the back of a sofa and through the window standing between herself and the photographer. As far as Barley is concerned, there is only one view from my parents’ home that is worth a damn, and that’s the view out the back that lets her monitor the comings and goings of people leaving and arriving by car. Keen-eared, she knows the listen for motors and will stand, excited on the sofa to see who has come home. It is only once a person has approached far enough that she scoots off the sofa and navigates to the back door. Here, we see a decidedly different energy: That of people departing for some adventure and leaving her behind.

Barley, a dog, rests her head on her paws on the edge of a big pillow, with her elbows and chest supported by a second, shorter pillow, and her body below the waist on the remaining extent of the sofa. It was only after I snapped this picture that I realized we have witnessed another first in Barley’s eternal quest for comfort: the Pillow Staircase. This arrangement seems to have suited her especially well, because for once her eyes didn’t pop open the moment I raised an arm to take the photo.

Barley, a dog, is out of focus in the foreground. Behind her, a steep hill descends to a body of water, and beyond, an industrial port. We've not the time for games! I swear, I swear! The fog that seasonally cloaks the shore Has just now parted and revealed to me A city bright with lights and with spires tall! Let's see ourselves what game she plays at now! [All walk to the window] By all the gods, I see you speak the truth!

Barley, a dog, raises her head from her dedicated pillow, which is repeatedly emblazoned with “bonne nuit”. When Barley visits my parents, she has a dedicated pillow on the bed. This reflects the lessons learned from my early attempts to give her pillows wholly unsuited to her needs: Her “bonne nuit” pillow has a low profile and broad, tapered edges, more of a soft speedbump than a curb, and Barley is much more inclined to use such a pillow to rest her big block of a head.

Barley, a dog, looks over her shoulder lovingly as she lazes on the grass. One of the signs of how people-oriented Barley is the manner in which she deploys her vigilance. Some dogs, if stationed in the middle of a grassy expanse, will scan the horizon and keep an eye on the movement of distant pedestrians. Others will watch for wildlife (read: prey). Barley? She checks in on what you’re doing.

Juniper, a dog, sleeps in a snuggly loaf atop her comically large and soft dog bed, in the company of her beloved plush toy named Husky. As big a game as Juniper presents to strangers in her yard and beasts on the screen, she reveals, in the vulnerability of sleep, what a fundamentally soft creature she is. While her weight is typical for her a dog her size, she has a lot of excess skin, especially around her neck. Perhaps the world of her dreams a little softer than ours.

Barley, a dog, stands on some steps as a baffling array of concrete terraces stretch up behind her. People who live on hills have to put up with some nonsense, to be sure, but it’s certainly a choice to lean way into the incline and reconfigure your yard into a ziggurat. The design of this “yard” centers on a three-story staircase of poured concrete, banked by vast concrete terraces. This is recent work, and I gather those terraces will eventually serve as planters for various trees and shrubs, which would make the approach feel less like scaling a temple. What’s not clear is whether the property owners have decided against installing a handrail out of neglect or out of active spite for any delivery-person who needs a package signed for.

Barley, a dog, lies like a rag doll as a blue plush monkey appears to gaze longingly at her. I’ve said it before, but I will never not be charmed by how completely Barley hits the brakes when she decides to stop playing. “Playful” is less a mood for Barley than it is an emotional surge that overtakes her and then abates. Thing is, she doesn’t really do this with other dogs, just with her soft toys. It’s almost as if she will decide to one of her toys needs a thrashing, as if suspending her disbelief about its animacy. Then, at some point, it no longer registers as “lifelike” and it falls back into the oubliette of being a mere object, unworthy of further consideration.

Barley, a dog, chomps enthusiastically on a stout branch while simultaneously wiggling on her back. This is officially unprecedented behavior. Barley approached this stick, snapped it up and in the same motion flopped into a vigorous wiggle while giving big chomps. I’ve never observed this in all our years together. There’s no telling how much more powerful she’s going to become if she keeps innovating like this.

Barley, a dog, sits beside an unpaved street so steep that her hind paws are are high as her forward elbows. There’s something very funny to me about urban planners who drop grids onto maps with hardly a care for their grade, creating a couple extra plots of land to sell to whomever is willing to make it work. This is especially true because, with modern civic tools, there are very real limits to how steep a road can be and remain paved. Once you get over 30 degrees, you start to run a very real risk of that the road will simply start to slide down the hill unless a lot of expensive stabilization is done underneath. For this reason, famously steep roads that must be paved will sometimes resort instead to cobblestones. Now, I’m no surveyor, and I’ve done no formal study of the matter, but I feel like the street in the photo is definitely getting close to a 40 degree grade for this single block, and I’m not at all surprised that the city simply gave up trying to pave it at all. It’s pretty difficult to even walk down - your foot slides a bit with every step. So I’m calling it: Steepest street. I will not be taking any questions at this time.

Barley, a dog, lies on brown grass facing sunward, with a monkey puzzle tree in the background. It’s said that Araucaria araucana is called the “monkey puzzle tree” because a 19th century British barrister quipped, of its thorn-plated branches, that “it would puzzle a monkey to climb that.” Perhaps my own inner primate echoes that sentiment, because I’ve always felt a vague bafflement when I encounter one. For her part, Barley found nothing whatsoever of interest when examining it, but was perfectly willing to take five in the sun while I snapped a pic.

Barley, a dog, lies on her side as she is viewed from above, lying on an abstract blue-gray sheet struck through with chaotic white streaks. Perhaps the most alien thing about a dog to a human is its aesthetic sensibility. There’s no sense that Barley has any opinion about this visually striking linen set, any more than a plain white sheet. It’s not clear that Barley would recognize an object as “artistic.” Her world is eminently practical: Food is good, and tasty food is best. Soft surfaces are nice, rough surfaces not so much. From a cynical perspective, this paints a picture of a life lived in a kind of aesthetic void, a world of wiremesh geometries, automatic scripts, and meters that need refilling. And yet. She has joys as well: Being close, making eye contact, reunion with familiar people. Barley’s aesthetic sensibilities, it seems to me, are entirely social, and all the world’s beauty is found in the living. She doesn’t watch our movies: We are her movies. She doesn’t listen to our music: We are her music. We are beautiful. You are beautiful. Just ask Barley.

Juniper, a dog, stands on her hind legs to bark at a chiropteran monster on the television screen. Juniper remains a steadfast guardian against screen beasts, who she will not abide even for narrative purposes. On the one hand, one can hardly fault her for not paying attention to the movie; on the other, one presumes this is not the spirit in which the filmmakers intended for the work to be experienced.

Barley, a dog, looks up from a toy that was, at one time, a lobster, before being whittled down by a process of damage and repair over many years. It’s wild to me that Barley has stuffed toys with literal years under their belt, the survivors of many tours of duty being enthusiastically thrashed by some serious chompers. Quite a few of these long-timers barely resemble their original forms, instead looking the way you might imagine a plushie would look if you could put one in a rock tumbler to smooth out its features. As always, the secret to such long and productive life is (a) making sure the toy remains understuffed, and (b) performing any needed repairs with short lengths of upholstery thread (whose durability relative to the thread used by garment makers continues to blow my mind).

Barley, a dog, looks up excited at an off-camera treat while licking her chops with gusto. Anyone who interacts with Barley hands-on is going to get to know her prodigious tongue, which she uses to bestow prosocial affection on everyone she meets. It’s genuinely wild how much surface area it can cover, and I find myself wondering how the entire slobbery lilypad of a thing can remain tucked so neatly inside her modest snout most of the time. Here, excitement over a treat has brought it out of hiding, and we get an unusually clear view how just how broadly it extends.

Barley, a dog, looks down the length of a bridge with orange lights. Barley, a dog, looks back over her shoulder on a bridge with blue lights. Over 20 years ago, the white globes covering a bridge’s light fixtures were replaced with blue globes as part of a weekend celebration. The community loved those blue lights so much that, when the white globes were restored, there was a general outcry. There was no going back, it was near-universally felt: The bridge must now be blue. So the powers that be swapped the party globes back in and the bridge has remained blue to this day. When, much later, a second bridge over the same body of water was built, symmetry demanded that the new bridge have a distinctive chromatic identity. I’m sure orange was an easy sell (it being a pretty typical color for lights to have), but it can’t have hurt that it sat directly opposite on the color wheel.

Barley, a dog, sits upon a vibrant, well-maintained mosaic bench, erected as a memorial to a man killed in a bicycle-vehicle collision. When I happened upon this bench, my first instinct was that it’s a very nice piece of public art, and that it’s a very community-oriented gesture to build such a piece on your property and have it face the sidewalks, as if to invite pedestrians to stop and rest for a moment. It was only after inviting Barley to have a seat so I could take a photo that I looked more closely at the six-panel story above the bench, declaring it a memorial dedicated to the memory of Matthew Schekel. In 1998, Matthew died at this intersection, and this bench was eventually erected in his memory. What struck me quite deeply was the condition of the mosaic tiles themselves: They had almost none of the grit or dusty residue that you would expect from something facing a street. The tiles were shiny, almost polished, in a way that you only expect from something that is being cleaned by hand on a regular basis. 25 years later, someone still cares enough to continue to tend to this memorial. It gave the deeply humbling feeling of sitting not in a memorial, but within the memory of the caretaker itself.

Barley, a dog, hovers her nose over a clay put half-filled with rain water. As the weather gets warmer each year, I need to become more vigilant about Barley deciding, mid-walk, to drink from one pool of water or another. The risk is much lower, however, immediately after rainfall. It’s hard to imagine the transformative effect of rain on a dog’s olfactory world, probably a bit like walking outdoors one day and realizing that “Oh, guess it’s just going to be one of those days when all the colors are ultra-saturated for some reason.” Here, we see Barley having an unusually long ponder about the smells coming from a half-full flower pot that, upon reflection, really could use better drainage.

A portrait of Barley, a dog, rendered as a minimalist ink sketch. If you’re looking to give your dog-loving extended family a low-cost gift, try this one simple trick! Simply affix a piece of paper onto a computer screen displaying a photo of your beloved pup and carefully trace the dog’s outline. Then, carefully add additional contour lines marking major boundaries (shoulders, hips, ears), with special attention to the parts of the face that are most expressive. Then add simple crosshatched shading, whiskers, and other details. Easy!