Barley, a dog, watches quizzically from inside a car whose windows are caked in a scattered powdering of tree pollen. The summer months are the only period during the year that Barley really needs a semi-regular bath. While not a stinky dog even on the worst of days, she can develop a little bit of aura after a week of heat-wave weather, a scent that’s just characterful enough that it would be within the bounds of good taste to freshen her up for the benefits of a sensitive guest to my office. So, too, does my car seem most in need of some intervention during these months, in which much of the local flora (particulars the many trees) tries its luck and unloads pollen into the air. For both, the coming of the rains provides a tasteful freshening up at regular enough intervals to keep them pleasing to the senses.

Juniper, a dog, sleeps on her comically large bed in a cable-knit sweater that clings to the contours of her body. As we all prepare to bid cohost a quiet passing into archival memory, we would all do well to keep our respective creatures close, and keep them warm. Theirs is a simple world, as compared with ours and its abstract and convoluted problems, and there is comfort to be had in bringin comfort to theirs. This is Juniper’s 85th post, on cohost’s final Juniper Friday, but an 86th entry will appear soon, as all our adventures will continue in all our widening worlds.

Barley, a dog, is photographed relaxing on the futon. The image quality is weirdly grainy in a way that only the lowest-cost image sensor on the market can provide. There is a slice of time in the photo-record of Barley’s adventures in which the images, while digital, have a kind of grain that feels unnatural in an era of surprisingly powerful phone cameras. Its trademark is an even scattering of dark motes, as if the photo had received a very light dusting of soot from a passing chimneysweep’s broom. During this period of time, my phone of many years had given up the ghost: It was never not hot to the touch, and (despite multiple battery replacements) could no longer hold a charge for more than a couple hours. So, as a stopgap, my phone company provided me what I thought of as the Pity Phone: a burner in all but name, retailing at around $30, whose CPU was so underpowered that it needed to run a comically toybox custom fork of Android. The phone had a camera, as all modern smart phones do. Nevertheless, the combination of the cheapest sensor money can buy and a puny CPU with no spare clock cycles to gussy up a noisy image resulted in photography that was literally the least one could do: Simultaneously blurrier and crunchier than you would want, a look so distinctive it effectively becomes its own data-moshed aesthetic.

Barley, a dog, sleeps deeply on a sofa in a sunbeam. The light scattered off of her orange body tints the fabric of the sofa, creating an impression that she is giving off a golden glow. It’s hard not to play favorites when one has a dog, because it’s very natural to reflect their intense and unconditional affect back at that in whatever form they express it. Even so, I can’t help but notice how often people speak of Barley’s warmth and friendliness, even relative to their own dogs! While she is a bit rambunctious, I don’t think I’m overstepping the bounds of good taste when I say that there seems to be a consensus that Barley has a palpable aura that is a bit special even among members of this very special species.

Barley, a dog, puts her paws up on a retaining wall and locks eyes briefly with a goat who, lying on the ground in the shade, has turned its head to face her. I’ll still stop by the neighborhood goats from time to time, but Barley has expressed such resolute disinterest in them (and they in her) that I was quite surprised by this moment. I assumed I would simply catch Barley on camera walking past, but she hopped up to check, and the goat looked back. And just as I snapped the picture, the moment ended: the goat turned away, and Barley proceeded to sniff a bit at the grass up top before hopping back down to street level. It seems wholly understood by both parties that what the other is up to is none of their concern. But a moment like this tells me they are definitely still aware of one another.

Barley, a dog, looks dashing in her collar and harness, waiting with eager patience for her leash to be attached so that an adventure may begin. Well, gang, we did it. We made it to 500 posts about Barley on this daily blog (in addition to 84 posts about Juniper), which means I can finally deploy The Joke Post Title to mark the occasion. In that time, many of you following her adventures on cohost have said nice things about this dear creature, who would love you immediately if you met her (and already does if you already have). At the time of this posting, a week from today will be the final day that new Barley content appears on cohost. However, it will not be the end of her story! As many of you already know, Barley’s adventures will continue, much as they have until now, on her dedicated Neocities page. To mark the occasion, I have made an 88x31 button that I invite people to use to link to her adventures. Her page also includes an RSS feed, so you can be notified of each post as it arrives. Those of you already reading this post on her new site may not be familiar with RSS. It’s worth looking into! I’m using Feeder at the moment, but there are many other RSS readers out there. As the 2010s model of social media continues to fragment and disintegrate, why not reacquaint yourself with reading blogs? One additional note: I plan on rebuilding the entirety of Barley’s posting history on her new page, but that will take time that I don’t currently have. As such, if you do subscribe to Barley’s RSS feed, I apologize in advance for the notifications you will be receiving as I fold hundreds of old posts back into the timeline, dated to their original release. Just mark her feed as read and move on. (Or, perhaps, check out some of her older posts!) I’ll be including the button linking to Barley’s new feed above on the remaining cohost posts, which I promise is as close to having ads as Barley’s adventures will ever come. Thanks again for joining me on this journey for the last 500 (plus 84!) days.

Barley, a dog, stands in a sunny park with an expanse of grass behind her. Turning her head slightly away from the sun, she gives her own nose a real big lick. Taking Barley on walks on a bright and windy day is a distinct experience because she spends so much time simply allowing the world to come to her. We’ll be walking, and she’ll stop and face the wind and stand, her ribcage pulsing from the steady stream of little sniffs she makes to read the news. English does not, so far as I’m aware, have an olfactory equivalent of “staring,” so my temptation is to say that she stares into the distance, but I can’t say for certain how much she’s even paying attention to her eyes. For my part, the whole point of the walks, beyond mere exercise, is to get her out and about and stimulated by the world, so I just stop and wait. Eventually, she brings her vigil to a close with a BIG ole lick to the nose to reset the instrument.

Barley, a dog, trots down a forest path amid trees and ferns. A surprising number of dead, orange leaves are scattered about. It was quite odd to take Barley on this forest walk, and at first I couldn’t place what felt wrong. What I eventually realized is that by brain was having trouble reconciling the heat-wave temperatures of late July (when this photo was taken) with seeing so many dead leaves scattered about. I’m guessing this is some accidental byproduct of (a) the comparative dry summer around here and (b) the trail having the protection of just enough of a canopy of branches that much of the direct sunlight is scattered, slowing its ravaging influence.

Juniper, a dog, lies on the floor beside a red sofa and looks at an offscreen television with rapt attention. I absolutely did not appreciate the unusual intensity of Juniper’s relationship with television until after Barley had joined the household. In this ancient photo, we see Juniper at the very boundary of adulthood, still less than a year old, transfixed by the glowing noisebox. She was a bit less anxious, then, and a lot less picky, and would sit and watch just about anything with us, calm and quiet (unless some screenbeast wandered into frame, of course). Today, it’s easier to identify her comfort genres (sitcoms and cooking shows) by how every part of her body relaxes when she watches them, except her eyes, which remain wide.

Barley, a dog, sprawls on a sofa and, her chin on her paws, looks up from the armrest at the camera with a plaintive look. Barley does not, so far as I can tell, experience satiety cues. Even after a full meal, she will remain interested if folks around her are eating food, and will very much give you the eye to see if you might spare a bit for her. I realize that some consider this to be “bad manners” for a dog, but I’m skeptical of efforts to narrowly delimit acceptable dog behavior. As such, I’ll often give Barley a little taste of what I’m having, nothing that would spoil her appetite. In this particular case, Barley was the enthusiastic recipient of a tiny corner of an orange slice moments after this picture was taken.

Barley, a dog, sleeps on her belly with her head turned toward the camera, her snout resting on her paw as if she is striking a demure pose. I often crack wise about the limits of Barley’s stamina, but the truth is that mine isn’t anything to write home about either. As such, while she will sometimes come home from a long walk rather tired, she’s rarely so thoroughly knocked out by a walk that it would be fair to say she’s exhausted. The one terrain for which I hold a clear advantage, however, is hills. She gets tired very easily by steep uphill grades, possibly because they engage some of her secondary muscles differently. In this photograph, we see a Barley freshly home from a summer’s walk up various 15° to 25° grades, so pooped that she flopped onto the bed in a full sploot and could not be bothered to stand up again when sleep came for her.

Barley, a dog, examines a wide 180-degree turn on a downhill slope, such that a driver would round the bend, passing Barley as they do so, and receive their first glimpse of the shoreline at the end of a straightaway. An experience one gets used to living in an area that is at once hilly and woodsy is that a lot of roads need switchbacks to achieve a reasonable grade, but the trees limit your sight lines anywhere but along the road. This can create a feeling of suspenseful disorientation: It can be a bit hard to tell which direction you’re headed (beyond uphill or downhill), and your destination remains out of view, until you make that final turn that brings you, at least, back to the water’s edge. But upon reflection, I realize that Barley has likely never had this experience, because her experience of cars is one in which agency is not merely denied, it’s unimaginable. From her point of view, the boss says “Car Time” and so car time it is, but it’s a pure lottery every time she gets in. Will this drive bring us to the office? Or the grocery store? Or the vet?! No way to know. I imagine she merely experiences it in the moment, and so probably doesn’t have a sense of progress. And you can’t experience the buildup & release of suspense if you don’t have an expectation. Instead, the sea comes as a surprise. “Oh! OK, it’s Sea Time I guess. Cool.”

Barley, a dog, sniffs about along the base of a weather-scarred wooden wall, its paint flaking off in large chunks after years of neglect. There’s an aesthetic conceit that is often explored in photography, that humanity’s creations are doomed to wither and decay, allowing nature, indefatigable, to reclaim its rightful place. It’s hard not to dwell on entropy when Barley pauses in front of some shed or garage that’s been deemed a sacrifice by its owner. In this instance, I can surmise that this garage is both too small for modern cars and too difficult to access, making its upkeep pointless. The truth is, of course, that we, and nature, are not special in entropy’s eyes. That which is neglected will decay, and it is only by a laborious uphill battle that anything is maintained. Nature merely seems robust because it is a fully decentralized effort, wherein each individual arc of creation and destruction is subsumed by the roiling wave of all those around it. Humanity’s works feel fragile because their upkeep is someone’s job, and too often, someone else’s job. So keep making. Keep building. Chip in. Bring in a load from the car. Don’t wait for someone else to fix it. You don’t need to give everything you’ve got if we’re all, as a wave, doing what we can.

Barley, a dog, stands in an unreasonably lush expanse of grass that extends to the edge of the frame on all sides. Small white flowers are scattered throughout, helping to give a sense of perspective. As much as suburbanites yearn for the lushest, dankest lawns that year-round sprinklers can buy, I think they’re far from Barley’s ideal. She’s not a fan of having so much mud between her toes that it starts to cake in, and a lawn this moist grows from soil that’s never fully dry. Laws on this scale present a further problem: With no obvious landmarks, she gets a kind of restlessness, sniffing at the ground less and less and favoring instead targets on the far horizon. In her perfect park, she’s never more than 100 feet from a tree, never more than 50 feet from a shrub. Like the cautious sailors before the Age of the Sail, she sticks close to the scented coastline, and hesitates to venture into the open ocean.

Barley, a dog, extends a pay past the edge of a throw pillow as she rests on a sofa, and her toe gently folds the corner of a magazine over on itself. I think Barley is probably a little frustrated by the amount of time I spend in office chairs. Like many dogs, she wants to be close. Not necessarily touching, but near enough that any small movements of your body will register. When I visit my parents, she will capitalize on the popularity of the living room couch as a venue, both for reading the paper and watching the news. Couches can mean snuggles, of course, but Barley’s quite happy simply to be quite near. She may stare at you for long periods of time, but don’t worry. That’s just because she loves you.

Juniper, a dog, nestles into a large throw cushion such that her front and back paws are bundled together on the cushion, while her butt pokes past its edge and rests on the couch directly. Unlike Barley, whose main rest posts are to bend into a face-covering croissant or to flop her body flat and sideways, Juniper prefers an approach that lets her paws touch. She’s he’s snuggling against you, she’s prone to putting multiple paws (sometimes all of her paws) on you to gently monitor your proximity, but on her own, she’ll just touch her own paws together instead. I’m just glad she can tell when she’s near to herself.

Barley, a dog, stands tall trying to see a little bit higher over the top of a wall made of concrete pavers where it joins an embankment built from loose stone. One of Barley’s signature moves is “I don’t understand that countertops exist.” It’s genuinely a blessing: I’ll be cooking up a tasty steak on the stove and she’ll wander into the kitchen in pursuit of that scent and then just look around like it’s a complete mystery where I’ve hidden a whole savory meal. So imagine my surprise when Barley clambered her way up this wall and started actively scanning back and forth (her head is a bit blurry because it was in motion) as if trying to see over this wall. My best guess is that there must have been some powerfully compelling scent, such as that of a cat, that was made very recently at this particular junction, and Barley’s just gotta know which way it went!

Barley, a dog, strikes a moody post as she lies comfortably in the dappled sunlight of a lazy late-summer afternoon. When relaxing with Barley indoors, her instinct is generally not only try to make eye contact, but to maintain it. Her appreciation of scritches is that much more evident when she locks eyes with you. When outdoors, however, her attention is always a bit more scattered. Often, I’ll speak to her while we’re, and as I do so, she’ll glance about, or scan the surroundings. She’s definitely not ignoring me, she’s taking in the info, but her sense of our team activity is a bit different from my sense of our conversation. The wind, I’m sure, carries a steady supply of New Clues compared to the bland steadiness of familiar indoor air, but more than that, I think it’s only on her home turf that Barley really fully relaxes.

Barley, a dog, rests on a sofa with her paws on the armrest, her head up, her ears forward, and her eyes alert. As much as Barley is a dog who lives in the moment, she certainly also lives with palpable concerns about the immediate future. Her concern when people leave is real, she can tell they are leaving, she’s knows what’s likely to happen next. Her hopes are similarly short-lived: A burst of enthusiasm when there’s a clue of looming good news. I don’t think she can project too much further into the future, though. I sometimes wish I could assure her that everything will be OK, that life will find its balance. Instead, I have to trust that she is resilient, that she’s already bounced back from so much, that she will survive.

Barley, a dog, stands calmly on a gravel path. behind her, a dirt path winds up an embankment otherwise full of greenery, and in the distance, the pilings of a tall bridge are visible, adorned with layers of colorful street art. Barley’s not nearly as muscular as she was when she first traveled cross-country, but she’s still plenty fit and plenty strong. Like a lot of distance runners, however, her legs have a bit of a stilt-like quality. The real power comes from muscles further up the leg, and she reflects their power with the cable-like thickness of the tendons in her forelimbs. Since I spend so much time watching her from behind, and up close, I don’t often get the chance to appreciate her standing tall, in profile, as she is here, and as the bridge in the background is also doing.