In the left panel, Barley, a dog, sits behind a screen door, her tail wagging fast enough to create motion blur. In the right panel, she looks up excitedly at someone approaching, whose legs are just coming into the frame. Barley handles being left on her own well, inasmuch as she doesn’t whine, doesn’t howl, doesn’t act out or get destructive. There is every indication that she pines silently for the departed for a little while, then goes to sleep. But she never really spends that much time alone - it’s rare for her to be on her own more than two or three hours - and I still wonder whether, in spite of her good behavior, she still experiences sadness when her humans depart. Her enthusiasm whenever anyone familiar arrives, whether they’ve been gone for ten minutes or six months, is always quite pronounced, so because her time alone is actually pretty minimal, I don’t think it’s out of the question that her joy at folks arriving probably adds up to a net positive when balanced against her sadness at folks leaving.

Barley, a dog, walks past a mysterious pile of something that is covered in a heavy green plastic tarp, the entire perimeter of which is weighed down by large, flat stones. Look, I know this is probably some pile of boring raw materials that, for whatever reason, need to avoid getting rained on while some project is in progress, but I for the life of me cannot get the thought out of my head that a shrub got in over its head with some loan sharks and is now getting violently iced by blocking the rays of the life-giving sun. What kind of racket has this yard got going on?!

Barley, a dog, stands on a wooden deck in the late afternoon and faces the sun. Barley closes her eyes and extends her tongue, making a little blep. Barley looks away from the sun and extends her tongue more fully, touching her nose. Barley will quite often, stop and deliver these thousand-yard stares that appear very thoughtful. It’s only by watching her nose and the subtle rhythm of her ribcage to see that she’s probably not looking at all, but is instead smelling. Indeed, she almost always does this facing into the wind, it’s just that the air motion can be so subtle as to hardly register as a breeze if you aren’t paying attention. Having given a sufficient sniff, the tongue must do its thing, and reset her sniffer for maximum acuity.

Juniper, a dog, rests on her giant dog bed with her beloved and immaculate monkey plush. The extent to which Juniper Is Baby, even as she is solidly middle-aged, is something only witnessed by those she has become fully comfortable around. For all her wariness, all her patrolling of the perimeter, all her barking at passing cars, I think the thing Juniper wants most dearly is for things to be safe and chill. Inevitably, some of the unrest in her life comes from within, but I don’t doubt that Juniper hopes that someone could Take Care Of It and let her unwind.