Hello, and welcome to Eric's room. I'm Rachel Appling. I'm 52, I'm a middle school librarian, and I live outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with my husband Max; our daughter Emily, who is 15 and a sophomore and thinks this whole page is a little much; and Biscuit, who is the reason for it.

Biscuit is our American cocker spaniel. She is nine years old and buff, which is what cocker people call that soft golden blond, and she is going a little gray around the muzzle, which I can sympathize with. She came home as a puppy on Christmas morning, 1990, when our son Eric was nine. He named her (she was the color of a biscuit, and he was not wrong), he carried her around for the rest of the day, and that night she slept on his bed. She has slept on his bed every night since. Nine years. I can't think of anything else in this house that has been that reliable, the furnace included.

On Saturday, August 21, Eric left for his freshman year at a state university four hours from here. We packed the van to the roof, drove him up, carried it all up the stairs, made his bed for him (he let me), and drove home. Biscuit met us at the door, looked past us at the van for a good long while, and then went down the hall to his room and got up on his bed. That is more or less where she has been ever since.

She didn't get the memo. Nobody has figured out how to send it to her.

So Max, who fixes things in this family, set up a camera. On Saturday, September 4, Labor Day weekend, he put a little webcam on top of Eric's dresser, aimed it at the bed and the window, and hooked it up to the old computer Eric left behind. Now a fresh picture of Eric's bed comes up on this page every 15 minutes, all day long, so Eric can look in on her from school.

That's the official reason. Here's the honest one: the camera is for us as much as it is for Eric. Max says he doesn't look at it during the day. Max looks at it during the day. I look at it from the computer at the circulation desk more often than I'm going to admit on the World Wide Web. I know perfectly well the dog is fine. I think I'm checking on the rest of us.

Eric checks it between classes from the computer lab, and from his dorm room, which has an Ethernet jack in the wall. Max has explained the Ethernet jack to me twice. What it comes down to is that our son can see our dog faster than we can. And so, it turns out, can half his floor. More about them below.

After three weeks of watching, I can tell you what time it is in our house just by where the dog is. A boy on Eric's floor asked for a key (see Letters from the Dorm), so here it is.

Every picture has the date and time printed in the lower right-hand corner, so you always know how fresh your dog is.

Tuesday, September 21, 3:15 p.m. Right on time.

Every school day since she was a puppy, Biscuit has gone to Eric's window at 3:15 to watch for his bus. Nobody taught her. She just knew what time it was. Eric used to say he could see her ears in his window from the corner.

The bus still comes by at 3:15. Eric isn't on it. She goes to the window anyway.

She doesn't use the bed for this. She stands on the floor beside the desk, gets up on her back legs with her front paws at the window, and watches the street until the bus has come and gone. Then she gets back on the bed, and that's that until supper.

I didn't know she still did it. At 3:15 on a weekday, Max and I are both at work. The second week the camera was up, I happened to bring up the page at the library at a quarter past three, and I saw an empty bed, and then I saw her at the window. I had to go into the back workroom for a few minutes. One of my eighth graders asked me later if I had allergies. I said yes.

Sunday, September 19, 11:40 p.m. Lights out.

Eric left behind one old gray sweatshirt, too worn out at the cuffs to pack. Whether he left it for her on purpose, nobody will say. The first week he was gone, I went in one morning and found she had pulled it off his desk chair in the night, dragged it up onto the bed and slept on it.

So now we have a routine. Every night on my way to bed, I spread the sweatshirt out by his pillow, and she climbs on, turns around three times and goes to sleep. Every morning I fold it and put it back on the chair, so that his room still looks like a bedroom and not a museum. It's a fine line. I'm aware. It still smells like him, which is the whole point, and I have not washed it. More than one person in this family has told me that's disgusting. It stays the way it is until Thanksgiving.

The night pictures are dark and grainy. All the camera has to work with is the nightlight by the desk (that orange glow) and the streetlight out front. But that golden smudge at the head of the bed is a dog who is exactly where she means to be.

Eric was up that night too. When I checked my e-mail at school Monday morning, there was one from him, sent at 11:46: "She's on the sweatshirt. Tell her good night." I told her when I got home. She took it well.

Here is her schedule, the way she keeps it. She does not take requests.

The mail carrier. Her enemy. Every day between 11 and noon, a perfectly nice person who has been bringing our mail for years comes up the front walk, and every day Biscuit gets off Eric's bed and goes to the front door to say exactly what she thinks about it. If you see an empty bed at 11:30 and then a dog back on it looking very pleased with herself, the house has been saved again.

The hedgehog. A squeaky stuffed hedgehog, her favorite thing in the world after Eric. This is hedgehog number four; we buy them two at a time now. If you see a small brown lump near the pillow that isn't her, that's the hedgehog.

The groomer. Every seven weeks, and she knows. I don't know how. I don't say the word. I don't get the leash out early. But on the morning of a grooming appointment she gets under the dining room table and makes herself as heavy as a sack of potatoes. Her next appointment is Saturday, October 16, her first one on camera. Look for an empty bed that morning and a very clean, very offended dog that afternoon.

People write and ask, so here's what I know.

• She's a bird dog. The American cocker spaniel is the smallest of the sporting breeds, a bird dog at heart under all that hair. Biscuit has never done anything about a bird in her life, but she watches the ones at our feeder with tremendous seriousness.

• The ears need cleaning every week. We do hers on Sunday nights, and she puts up with it because there's a treat at the end. They also go in her water dish every time she drinks, so she drips her way down the hall.

• The coat needs a groomer every six to eight weeks. Otherwise she turns into a hearth rug. Biscuit goes every seven, for a short, tidy trim, because she is a dog who lives on a bed and not one who goes to shows.

• Yes, she looks like Lady. Lady in Disney's Lady and the Tramp is a cocker spaniel. Every child who comes to our door tells us so. We know. She's heard.

How It Works, by Max

Letters from the Dorm

When Max put the camera up, I thought Eric would look in on her now and then. I did not expect his whole floor. Somebody walked past his room the first week while Biscuit was on his screen, and word got around. Eric says that when she goes to the window at 3:15, somebody yells it down the hall. Then the mail started. I've left off everyone's names, since these are other people's children.

• A girl from the third floor writes that she looks in on Biscuit every morning before her 8 o'clock class. Her own dog is home with her parents, three states away, and she says this is the next best thing. She wanted to know if Biscuit would like a postcard. Biscuit would.

• A boy from across the hall wrote one morning, very worried, because the bed had been empty for half an hour. It was the mail carrier. I wrote back and explained, and he asked if I'd put the explanation on the page so the rest of the floor would stop worrying too. That's where the key came from.

• Eric's roommate, who has never met her, wrote to ask whether he could call Biscuit his dog too, since he sees more of her than he does of his own family. I said yes, but not to say so in front of her. She doesn't share well.

• And one young man wrote just two lines. His family's dog died this summer, and he likes to leave the BiscuitCam up on his screen while he studies, because his room feels less empty that way. I didn't know what to say to that. I wrote back anyway, and I told him he's welcome any time.

Eric says all this has made him a little bit famous. He says it the way you'd say you'd come down with something. I think he's pleased.

Emily was offered a whole section of her own. She took one line:

Saturday morning, August 21, in our driveway, a few minutes before we left.

I took this one with our regular camera and had it developed at the drugstore. It's the last picture of the two of them before he went. I cut off the top of the van, because I was not at my steadiest.

The van is packed to the roof: boxes, his lamp, a laundry basket full of who knows what, and the rug for his room. Biscuit knew something was up the week before, when the boxes started stacking up in the hall. That morning she got up on her back legs and put her front paws on him, which she is not allowed to do, and he let her, which he is not allowed to do either. Nobody said a word about it.

I have three prints. One is on the refrigerator, one is in my desk drawer at school, and one went up to Eric in his first care package, under a tin of chocolate chip cookies.

Max is driving up after lunch that Wednesday to get him. Four hours up, four hours back. I'll be home making the stuffing and pretending I'm not looking at the clock.

We haven't told Biscuit. She'd only go and sit at the window early.

Until then, she's keeping his bed warm, and we're keeping an eye on her, and that is how this family is getting through the fall.