Juniper, a dog, is goofy and happy while playing in the yard in the late afternoon. I’ve heard from folks that my writing about Juniper gives the impression that she isn’t an especially happy dog. While it’s certainly true that she’s moody and very much a creature of habit, I think she’s doing well and having a good time. Above all, she’s a dog who needs a job and really enjoys completing some mission objective, no matter how small. Whether it’s stepping outside for a few minutes to quickly patrol the perimeter, or fetching a toy on command, she wants to make herself useful and seems to feel very accomplished when she does so.

Barley, a dog, gives Tico the sloth an eyeful. Tico’s face has mostly been chewed off at this point. “I can’t believe Barley ate her face!” says owner who voted for the Barley Eats Toys’ Faces Party.

Barley, a dog, sits a few feet away from a sloth plushie. The scene seems entirely innocent. “Us? We just met, but I can tell we’re going to be great friends. Right, Tico? This is Tico, my new friend. Come oooon, why you keepin’ your distance? Get over here, ya big goof.”

Barley, a dog, views the photographer a little suspiciously through a clear plastic barrier, against which is wedged a copy of “The 21” (2023) by Elizabeth Rusch. My experience of bookstores has changed as I’ve grown older. As a youth, bookstores gave me a feeling of immense potential, that there was surely so much cool stuff to be discovered by someone with the wherewithal to sift through what the stacks had to offer. Today, I can’t quite shake a sort of lingering dread: “Geez, I hope someone is reading all these.” I think what’s contributed to this is the speed with which books that I think are excellent get pushed to the temporal horizon by the never-ending flood of new books being published. The firehose of Content that is generated on the Internet (much of it bad) is overwhelming but also relatively easy to step away from. A good bookstore is that firehose made manifest as literal tons of paper and cardstock, a wave that would crush you flat if it crashed upon you. I find myself dwelling on these feelings when I discover loose books out and about on my walks with Barley. In addition to the countless little libraries I find set up throughout various neighborhoods, I’ve run across my fair share of books out and about, exposed to the elements. I can only hope whoever decided this was the best way to dispose of a book at least gave it the courtesy of reading it first, because…

Barley, a dog, angles her body to get her tongue as far as she can into a glass jar of peanut butter. I don’t use peanut butter for much myself, but it’s a staple for my parents. Between my visits, they’ll get a jar down to the last dregs, then keep it at the back of the fridge as a treat for Barley to enjoy when we next make it into town. For her part, Barley has proven very adept at navigating the particular challenges of extracting food residue from a glass jar. She understood right away that it wasn’t a contained she could carry in her teeth the way she could a plastic yogurt container, so her extraction procedure relies heavily on precision tongue use and on keeping her angle of approach aligned with the where the jaw makes contact with the carpet, to keep it from rolling away.

Barley, a dog, trots past the camera, giving her a blurry appearance that contrasts with the sharp focus of the background. If Barley were a cryptid, she would almost certainly be “discovered” because of her friendly personality, and not because someone had set up wildlife cameras to monitor her movements. She would no doubt blow past them in a rush, leaving only blurry photos to confound the true believers.

Barley, a dog, has sunken some ways into a dog bed atop another, comically large dog bed. While Barley has been a big fan of her absurd oversized bed, she is a dog, and she will from time to time feel the need to fuss with the substrate to get it more comfortable before popping down. I’m a little nervous that her fussy digging motions will eventually put a hole in the outer shell, so I have left her older dog bed on top of the new one. So far, she’s been content to dig for bonus softness through the smaller dog bed, and I’m willing to call my layer cake approach a success for comfy sustainability.

Juniper, a dog, is photographed sleeping next to a broad-leafed house plant. One of the realities of Florida architecture is that interior air recirculation probably isn’t going to be great. The air coming in isn’t so much fresh as it is the byproduct of the air conditioning process, and any other air exchange needs to be kept to a minimum to avoid letting in the heat and humidity. As such, there are clear benefits to keeping some hardy houseplants around as natural air fresheners, converting the pesky CO2 we keep breathing out back into restorative oxygen. Here, we see Juniper breathing softly, enjoying a gentle snooze, and even before it has had a chance to cross the room, an attentive houseplant is hard at work refreshing her breath for her, preparing it to be inhaled once again.

Barley, a dog, rests on a throw pillow. She is photographed from a low angle, near her rump, as if she was a rolling landscape extending into the distance. Something fun about photography is it forces us to think about how weird things look from a point of view, without the sanity check of getting to live in 3D. IT’s the most obvious thing in the world that, if you get up real close to an object, the part you’re close to will be much larger on your retina than the parts even a little further away. But when you’re doing this in 3D space with a physical object, visual cortex automatically reframes your visual experience as a space with depth and perspective. In a photograph, you can’t slide your head a bit to the side to adjust your view: You’re stuck with the camera’s point of view. It’s really only in reflection that I get to imagine this photo of Barley not as a closeup I snapped on a whim, but of a dog as a mountain range extending toward the horizon, the gentle wend and weft of her fur becoming the tall grass that a traveller will have to push through to reach the distant cliffs of her floppy ears and the gentle peak of her brow.

Barley, a dog, gets long on the futon, while overhead Jacob Horse from Drawfee also gets long. If you pay attention to what’s around you while walking a dog, you will regularly notice strange artifacts that make hints about the hidden lives of those living in the neighborhood. Of the strange objects I’ve stumbled upon in recent months, none puzzled me more than this Oujia cheese board lying by the side of the road. Imagine contacting the dead and then inviting them to choose between “MORE WINE!” and “MORE CHEESE!” If I’m a ghost and you disturb my eternal slumber to ask this, that’s it, I’m definitely going to be giving you night terrors going forward.

Barley, a dog, inspects a cutting board for cheese that is also a Ouija board, which has apparently been abandoned on the street. If you pay attention to what’s around you while walking a dog, you will regularly notice strange artifacts that make hints about the hidden lives of those living in the neighborhood. Of the strange objects I’ve stumbled upon in recent months, none puzzled me more than this Oujia cheese board lying by the side of the road. Imagine contacting the dead and then inviting them to choose between “MORE WINE!” and “MORE CHEESE!” If I’m a ghost and you disturb my eternal slumber to ask this, that’s it, I’m definitely going to be giving you night terrors going forward.

Barley, a dog, has her attention called to an ambiguous stone sculpture of an animal by the side of a house, which is buried in loose dirt right up to its eyes. As a teen playing Dungeons & Dragons, there were moments that the basic silliness of the D&D aesthetic went too far. The flail snail, for example, was such an obvious punchline, invented purely as a bit of wordplay, that my teenage self-importance could not abide it, and was offended that it even appeared in sourcebooks. Other monsters were still silly but felt plausible enough (perhaps as the product of some ancient magical research gone awry) that it didn’t trip my alarm bells. I was never wild about the displacer beast, but they didn’t feel like they would turn my game into a Saturday Morning Cartoon. Sitting right on that boundary of fantastical credibility was the bulette, or “landshark.” Its framing as “a shark but on land” is what pushes it over the edge for me, it’s such a Merry-Melodies-ass sales pitch. At the same time, however, high speed burrowing creatures can be pretty scary! So while I never actually used one in a campaign I was running, it wasn’t banished to the Ridicule Zone either. Imagine my surprise, then, when Barley discovered this rare “land gator” (which, upon closer inspection, was actually a concrete bullfrog).

Barley, a dog, grasps a brand-new caterpillar plush in her jaws, with a bit of motion blur to signal that the photo is taken during play. One of Barley’s big wins over the holidays was an especially long and hefty caterpillar toy. The web tells me this particular crawlie is named Katie, and her best feature (aside from the manufacturer’s high overall durability) is that she has not one, not two, but three squeakers, one in the middle and one at either hand. As such, however Barley gets a hold of her, I can always grab another bit and give it a few quick squeaks, which gets Barley all wound up again.

Barley, a dog, rests her head on her paws as she lies at the top of the stairs, peering down at the photographer. Barley’s not usually one to view things from a distance, but we had returned from a walk amidst the steep hills near where my parents live, and she was definitely tired. Having climbed the stairs, she seemed a little put out when I turned on my heels and headed right back down because I had forgotten something. She must have sensed that I would be right back, because instead of following close as she usually does, she plopped down and waited.

Juniper, a dog, relaxes on the couch with great intensity while holding her toy squirrel. See, the thing is, she is a dog who is the creature but also like the creature.

Barley, a dog, trots along an inclined lawn. The street in the background is wet, but is drying in banded striped. For whatever reason, some of the streets near my parents’ home have narrow grooves in the concrete, running perpendicular to the direction of traffic. It always struck me that effectively giving the neighborhood corduroy streets might not be prudent (seems like the roads would wear more rapidly), but maybe there’s some benefit from the way they channel water and prevent it from pooling. That might explain why, in the hours after it rains, the roads tend to dry in a pattern of blotchy, irregular bands, captured by accident in the photograph that was intended to simply be a shot of Barley trotting along with particular verve.

Barley, a dog, is oblivious to a sign in which a dog with a mustache is dabbing next to a pile of excrement. Sun exposure has given the sign a green tint. “I’ve been walking these streets for years and years, and never once, never once was my poop not cleaned up. And still, these clowns, these absolute clowns, they depict me as dog who still thinks it’s cool to dab. Where’s my greasepaint? Where is my Cesar Romero mustache? I’m losin’ it, I tell ya, losin’ it!”

Barley, a dog, tromps her way through a large shrubby patch of plants with long, black leaves. I often chatter a bit when walking Barley, giving her a running commentary on whatever it is that she’s doing. She doesn’t pay me a lot of directed attention when I do so, since she’s mostly exploring her surroundings, but I have the sense that she likes that I’m paying attention. As I was taking this picture, I asked her out loud, in a slightly sing-song voice, “Aren’t these leaves a weird color?” Immediately, I realized the folly of the question. Being color-blind, Barley probably doesn’t even think this plant looks unusual.

Barley, a dog, stands amid mulch and shrubbery on a sunny winter’s day. We’ve had some downright pleasant winter days this last week, provided the walks aren’t too long and sufficient layers have been donned. While it’s been cold, there’s also been a lot of direct sunlight, without too much wind to spoil things. At these temperatures, Barley seems more invigorated by the cold than anything else, lively and light on her feet. This is a far cry from this time last year, when Barley was having Bad Times facing wicked cold snap and subsequent ice storm. Here’s hoping we’re past the worst of it, although I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we got ambushed by freezing rain some time in February.

Barley, a dog, lies flopped onto a sofa, awake but seeming rather bored. There was a widespread “funny because it’s true” joke that went around during lockdown about how the group that was happiest about that state of affairs were the pets whose owners were suddenly working from home all week. In Barley’s case, however, my good fortune in being able to bring her to work (where she has tons of friends) means that staying at home is a significantly more boring options for her. Add in cold, wet weather to the mix, and “winter vacation” (during which I’m mostly staying home and working hard) is probably the dullest part of Barley’s year. Fortunately for her, I’ll be headed back to work very soon, and she’ll get to see her workplace friends for the first time in the New Year.