Post for: #perilous link ^{(7 Posts)}

Barley, a dog, stands in front of a bizarre terraced yard made from concrete and bare earth that extends up and out of frame. This time, there is a handrail. Here we are, over a year later, and I am no closer to understanding the ziggurat yard. The earth along the road and back-filling the tiers are still bare earth, home to only tiny weeds that are still too small to have drawn the ire of whatever dark will has decided that this will be a monument to the inanimate, an edifice of desolate order. However, it now has a handrail. This was not part of the original design, and close examination reveals that it is being held in place by simple concrete screws that were sunk after the fact. To me, this exactly the same flavor of environmental storytelling as a sign in a shop forbidding some weirdly specific behavior: It’s a clue to a story that unfolded in the interim. For her part, Barley could not be less interested in these scaled-up LEGOs. Nothing here piqued her interest as even being worthy of a sniff. I had to cajole her to stay put while I took the photo, because she was eager to move on to (both literally and figuratively) greener pastures.

Barley, a dog, stands before a shallow earthen embankment around a shadowed depression in the ground. It is a sunny day. Here’s what the summer’s multiple heat waves have managed to do to the on-again-off-again pond that offered brief refuge to those ducks I posted about a bit ago. Well, nothing here for a duck right now. This will serve merely as a potential duck getaway for now, until the seasons bring back the rains and pairs of ducks who need some alone time.

Barley, a dog, lies on a futon. She rests her head against a green plush dragon with a tartan-coded belly, and dreams. The tag that came with this laughably inexpensive plushie for dogs told me its name was “Dream.” Everything about this line of toys, of which I’ve now seen at least a dozen different models, reads “tax incentive,” from the gossamer-thin materials, to a list price so low that they were likely being sold at a loss, to a promise that “one dollar would go to charity” for every toy purchased. The dragon’s tartan-coded underbelly was especially flimsy, and Barley managed to breach the fabric during her very first tussle with the beast. And yet, now stitched back up with upholstery thread and lighter by a leg, a snout, and about half of its stuffing, the dragon has now reached equilibrium and is one of Barley’s favorites, alongside other crappy toys from the same product line. They become her pillows as often as not, making it all the easier to go to sleep the moment she has decided she’s done playing. It’s impossible to say what sort of bond she might feel with the dragon, but it’s charming to me how much she favors it.

Barley, a dog, scrabbles up a big pile of mulch, sniffing with eager interest. Barley’s a big fan of mulch (as are we all). For starters, she’s not wild about getting her feet wet, and even during the rainy season, mulch is at once absorbant and relatively non-compressible, leaving her feet drier in the rain than when walking on grass or pavement. It also seems to be consistently interesting to sniff, perhaps because its absorbency helps keep recent scents aromatic for longer. I’d wager it’s a close second to decorative ivy for “ground covering Barley is most likely to venture out onto if given the chance.”

Barley, a dog, sleeps peacefully on her hotel bed with her cowprint throw blanket. After an uneventful weekend in the strange world of the airport periphery, Barley and I were able to go home to an apartment in need of only mild cleaning given the heavy-duty work that had happened in our absence. She was calm and relaxed in the room, and inquisitive in the “come but don’t stay” surroundings where we took our walks. No worrying signs of stress at all. Long-time fans of Barley will remember why I was as nervous about Barley being displaced. Years ago, a flooding issue in my apartment (almost certainly related in some way to the most recent work) resulted in a living arrangement Barley found so stressful that it almost killed her. The mystery remains as to why Barley is so unhappy in some temporary spaces and is completely relaxed in others. Differences in the smells left by cleaning products? Sounds outside my human hearing range? Who can say? What’s important is that she made it through this most recent episode without further incident, and is now happily back home.

Barley, a dog, sniffs curiously, and possible with disappointment, at a Halloween decoration depicting a 2D silhouette of a black cat wearing some flowers. I’ve described in a previous post the unseemly enthusiasm Barley has for cats. She reacts to them differently from any other animal, drawn toward them with saucer-wide eyes and claws digging into the earth for traction. So imagine my amusement when she thought she had her prey in her sights, and charged with vigorous abandon, only to find herself face to face with this Potemkin village of a cat. She sniffed at it for quite a while, and scoped out its edge from the side as if to confirm that, yes, this cat really is a flat sheet of metal and not a cat at all.

Barley, a dog, sploots in front of an office doorway, blocked by a dog gate, waiting for some friend to bring her a kind word. As much as Barley dislikes the carpet in my office, she’ll put up with it near my office door when she can reasonably anticipate that nearby friends might materialize to say hi and reach over the gate to scritch her behind the ears. Here, she’s been faked out by an ongoing conversation in the hall, just outside of her sight lines, and what moments ago was an expectant sit has now devolved, with a dramatic sigh, into a disappointed sploot. But she nevertheless remains vigilant. Surely, those people talking in the hall will pass the door any moment now…