Barley, a dog, sniffs at a grassy shrub crowded about on all sides by fallen autumn leaves. Her shadow is long despite the brightness of the sunshine. Once again, it’s that time of year when the noonday sun often slips behind rooftops, or gets lost in the trees, and even at its most direct rays warm you more from the side than from above. Work has not been especially forgiving to my schedule during daylight hours, but I try to make sure Barley still gets her share of sunlight every day. Fingers crossed that next week we’ll be able to go about things at a much more leisurely pace.

Barley, a dog, snoozes on the futon with her now-defeated cow, happily sleeping of the excitement of breaking the new toy in. No matter how exciting a plush toy is, Barley almost never sustains that high energy for more than perhaps 10 minutes or so before her mediocre stamina signal that it’s nap time. I can sometimes extend this play time a bit, but Barley generally knows when she’s done and simply stops reacting to toy, transitioning instead to giving me kisses and affection directly. In her mind, I think every one of these sessions is a hunt, and once the prey is subdued (and immobile), there’s no further need to subdue it. What follows is instead the celebration amongst pack-mates for another successful hunt.

Barley, a dog, chomps and worries at her new cow toy, slapping it with one paw while holding it in place with the other. When we first rescued Barley, she was very mouthy, almost exclusively so. She didn’t really seem to know what her paws were good for, and would push toys around on the ground until they got wedge somewhere. She also used her mouth, somewhat problematically, to get our attention or otherwise interact with us, so we had to dissuade her from doing so quite diligently. Mostly, we got there by reacting to even the slightest nibble as if we had been bitten hard, play-acting yelping in pain and shrinking away. As we shaped Barley to avoid nipping at us, we also shaped her to give “Paw.” Then, and even somewhat today, she doesn’t so much give you a paw to shape as she slaps her paw into your hand with quite a bit of force. We noticed, during those early months, that as she got better and more controlled at handshakes, she was also starting to manipulate her toys more with her paws. She seems to understand, now, that she can stabilize a toy by wedging it between her paws to facilitate chomping, so she’s become more dextrous, but her approach remains rather short of delicacy.

Barley, a dog, is a predatory blur rapidly approaching a plushie cow toy. While Barley has strong preferences about her chewin’ toys, she treats her plushies as mostly interchangeable. The exception to this is that she’s quite good at recognizing a new toy, which is much more exciting. Older toys that have been out of circulation for a long time are also something she gets very jazzed about. Here, a doofy little cow, brand new, is about to get mauled for the first time. After being told to sit and “Stay!” we see Barley releasing her pend-up excitement and sprinting into action.

Barley, a dog, tromps about in some freshly fallen leaves on a sunny day. November gave us a mix of sunny and rainy days, with few long stretches of sun (and then, always at a low angle in the sky). For a while there, piles of leaves, once rain-soaked, were not really getting fully dry again. As such, you could only count on finding piles of of crispety, crunchety freshly fallen leaves on day 2 or 3 of a sunny spell. Fresh leaves have the fewest opportunities to gain fruitful treasures that Barley might want to snarf down, so I’m happy to let her root around. Once patches of leaves had made their transition to damp, slippery carpets, I needed to be more vigilant of her exploratory sniffing, ready to intervene if she discovered something questionable. Now, however, temperatures have become sharply colder and the weather drier, and the longer stretches of cold, sunny days make it a lot harder to tell which leafpiles are new and which have merely been moved around by area leafblowers.

Juniper, a dog, holds a plush beachball in her mouth. She seems somewhat at a loss how to proceed. Juniper loves her big ball toy, as she does all her toys, but she also seems somewhat confused by it. On the one hand, it’s a ball, and she loves balls. Great to chase, great to chomp, no notes. But on the other hand, it’s also fuzzy, like all of her beloved creature toys, and those are her friends with which she must be gentle and nurturing. So if playtime is signalled, she’ll rush to chomp it, and then sort of… hang out with it in her mouth for a while. Eventually, it of course must suffer the secret fate of all toys, which is to be squirreled away in her crate for safekeeping.

Barley, a dog, sits politely with a purple llama toy leaning affectionally against her, ear-to-ear. I will admit to posing some of my photos, but only mildly. Barley was already in this expectant sphinx pose after having played with her llama, which lay beside her. I merely picked it up and gingerly laid it against her, which she did not object to in the slightest. I am, as always, bemused by the daffy, oblivious cheer that toys like this are designed to express. If you had seen what unfolded mere moments before this photo was taken, you’d be wondering what the llama was so darned happy about.

Barley, a dog, stands at the start of a chalk hopscotch grid drawn in a parking space. Had I grown up with family members my age, I suspect that various guardians (parents, teachers, babysitters, etc.) would have taught me some of the “child distraction tech” that has endured across the generations. Surely, “keep the kids busy” must be a major factor motivating instruction in the deeper mysteries of such timeless low-tech games as marbles, four square, jax, and hopscotch. Being on my own, I never encountered the rules in the wild, and the school playgrounds I grew up in were altogether too wild for something requiring this sort of setup and turn-taking. I know, vaguely, that it involves some process of dropping objects to complicate one’s trip across the grid, but that’s about it. So every hopscotch grid I encounter, even now, has the aura of arcane runes established for a ritual that I’ve heard of but never been inducted into. I have chosen, quite deliberately, not to satisfy this curiosity by looking hopscotch variants up on Wikipedia. Beyond my confidence that it’s probably not a Game Of The Year contender, I like the idea of letting some of the ritual mystery of youth remain the purview of the young.

Barley, a dog, sniffs around at the base of several enormous hunks of wood cut years ago from the trunk of a huge tree. In a post from some time ago, I described my experience of being temporarily displaced from my apartment by a (thankfully minor) flooding problem, which resulted in a Bad Time for Barley. While that story turned out fine in the end for her and for myself, I didn’t mention the sting in the tail for the awful model unit that we stayed in as an emergency measure. Not two weeks after we had moved back into my apartment, a monster ice storm swept through the area and overburdened one of the tallest trees in the neighborhood. In came down like an axe and split the building clean in half, wrecking the very model unit I had stayed in. Fortunately, it being a model unit, it was empty when the tree fell, so no one was hurt. Still it was quite a sight to behold when walking Barley the following morning. Before long, the ice had thawed, but even then it took nearly a month for a work crew to begin the disassembly of the beast. They had to bring in a crane to support the trunk from above while taking chunks off, to avoid the risk of it settling further and damaging the foundation. Gradually, bit by bit, the tree came apart and various bits were either carted off or mulched on the spot. Today, years…

Barley, a dog, snoozes on her dog bed with her head entirely beneath a coffee table, blocking every light source in the room. Generally, Barley simply curls up and sleeps. Ambient light has never been enough to talk her out of a good snooze. And since she tends to plop down first and get comfortable later, that’s generally the best she can do. In this case, however, she somehow managed to thread the needle and get her head entirely under the coffee table and away from any annoying lights. Not that I worry she’ll manage this feat too terribly often, but this is a good reminder that I need to vacuum under there.

Barley, a dog, is facing ahead, but is trying her hardest to walk sideways toward a nearby tree, stretching her leash taut. Barley often has strong opinions about the direction she would like to go while on walks, and these preferences often must be disregarded. For example, I’m generally going to keep my distance from busy streets, because Barley invariable gets it in her head that such streets must be crossed with great urgency. When our objectives are at 90 degrees from one another, Barley will often sustain this sort of “scrabblin’ crab walk” for a few dozen feet, making nominal progress in my intended direction, but facing and pulling the direction she wants to go. Normally, I’m happy to give her the impression of sled-doggin’ by pulling my along with the back clip on her harness, but at moments like these, I’m reminded that the harness also has a front clip. Would that I could switch where I was clipped at will to help turn her when it matters most.

Barley, a dog, enthusiastically licks the residue from a single-serving cup of yogurt. Barley has many fans who stop by my office to say hello. Some stop by daily, while others are only infrequent visitors who must go well out of their way to see her. Sometimes, she is the beneficiary of their lunch plans, and gets some precious yogurt leftovers. As calorically meager as a nearly empty cup of yogurt might be, Barley’s response to this generosity nevertheless displays all the enthusiasm of one who has received a great boon.

Juniper, a dog, curls up on her big dog bed, but her eyes are wide and aimed upward at a television outside of and above the frame of the photo. I find many things about Juniper’s television watching intriguing. Not only is she quite engaged when she watches screens, she appears to be comfortable doing so from such an oblique angle that the television’s image fidelity is surely impacted. Being a dog with limited color vision, the chromatic effects of viewing a flatscreen at an angle probably don’t bother her to much, but surely she can tell that the contrast is off. Furthermore, how does she square the television image getting narrower? She doesn’t seem to quite understand the 2D nature of screens (she still sometimes investigates behind the laptop screen if someone’s head ducks out of view on a video call), so is she lying on her bed in this photo thinking to herself, “Geez, the Bake-Off contestants sure are tall and narrow today.”

Barley, a dog, sits in the passenger seat of a vehicle, as seen through the window, which also shows reflections from the surrounding parking lot. Barley tolerates waiting in the car well, as she finds the comings and goings of people in parking lots to be quite interesting. Generally, she waits in the back seat, but if the car’s orientation is such that the parking lot is best observed from the front, she somestimes clambers over the mesh barrier and takes up a position in one of the front seats. While these are reasonably comfortable, they don’y offer enough room for her to lie down, so when I find she’s decided to be a front seat dog, it’s invariably in this sitting position.

Barley, a dog, sniffs around at the base of the tiniest dumpster I’ve ever seen. I had hoped having Barley in this photo would help convey a sense of scale, but even here, I don’t think I’m getting across how tiny these dumpsters are. They feel like adorable props for a theme park attraction intended to make little kids feel like they’re adults. There must be some cost advantage to the business renting these (presumably they just don’t generate waste fast enough to need the more typical sizes), but frankly I find these cute enough that there’s some added value right there.

Barley, a dog, investigates the outflow from a gutter that has been equipped with a decorative fish spout. Barley, I understand that you have every reason to be intrigued, but I promise you this: That fish has way worse breath than you do.

Barley, a dog, sleeps on a couch while curled up between two people who are just out of frame. I’ve met my fair share of people who find it “weird” that dogs become relaxed when squeezed. Got a nervous pup? Maybe try a thundershirt that acts a full-body hug that the dog can wear. While Barley has a talent for falling asleep just about anywhere, it’s notable how much she favors sleeping both on top of others, and with others on top of her. This no doubt has evolutionary advantages in terms of heat retention, but I think it’s just as important that the folks around her act as an ongoing affirmation that all’s well and everything’s calm. After all, if one member of a dogpile startles, everyone is going to get jostled. My hypothesis is that thundershirts co-op this effect, simulating (in a way unlikely to ever have emerged in nature) the feeling of being part of a big cuddle puddle while simultaneously free to move about the cabin.

Barley, a dog, chews her way down the length of a fallen branch, stripping away the bark and leaving exposed, slobbery wood behind. Barley decides only very occasionally that a stick is worthy of summary destruction, and on those occasions, she seems most pleased by the feeling of bark coming away from the underlying branch beneath. Once a stick has been thusly stripped, she’ll get on with the business of chewing/snapping it into little chunks, so the bark is not the sole attraction, but it nevertheless holds a particular appeal. This tells us something, perhaps, about what it is that dogs enjoy feeling when they chew recreationally. It seems clear to me that in order for a toy or stick to be worth of her toothsome attention, it must yield, incrementally. If she can’t perceive that she’s making progress, she loses interest pretty fast.

Barley, a dog, lies in a relaxed pose at the stop of a staircase, peering past the photographer to the right. Barley’s life inevitably involves a lot of down time. While she would no doubt love for there to be some sort of activity unfolding for her to participate in at all times, the practical reality is that most of her favored humans have “this many hours spent sitting” sorts of jobs and hobbies, and while we are engaged with them, Barley bides her time as best she can. Often, this consists of snoozing, but when I visit my parents, she is keenly aware of whether they are both at home, and she will preferentially station herself at one of her lookout spots to watch for their return instead of taking a nap. Here, we se her staring intently out a 2nd-story window that overlooks the entrance to the back yard, watching, waiting, believing in her hear that my dad will return from his morning walk any time now.