NPR Humorist Shelley Fraser Mickle Shares 'Itching to Love: The Story of a Dog'

Shelley Fraser Mickle, an award-winning author and storyteller for NPR’s Morning Edition, visits Writer’s Voices to talk about her heartwarming and hilarious new memoir, Itching to Love: The Story of a Dog. Along with various other things, her book is filled with anecdotes of the decade she spent with Buddy, her neighbor’s mischievous dog, who was a constant visitor at her farm and eventually became hers. Mickle, who was an empty nester at the time, shared the story of how Buddy came into her life. “…I was in the barn one day tacking up my horse to ride… and this dog, my neighbor’s dog across the street, when the neighbor would go to work, he would dig out from under the fence and spend time around my farm. So this one day, he ran in the barn and grabbed my horse’s galloping boot… I was outraged and I chased him home, and his owner always kept up the garage door like a foot… so I pushed it up and there sat Buddy in the corner of the garage with my galloping boot in his mouth… I then saw next to his feed bowl a whole lot of my things that he had stolen and hoarded… So, soon after that, my neighbor called… he said, ‘I’m getting married again and my new wife has a dog that Buddy instantly beat up. So will you take Buddy? He seems to have a thing for you.’ So, that’s the beginning of this story about the decade I spent with this dog. The first thing I had to answer was, what did he see in me that I did not see in myself?”

Aside from her life with Buddy, Mickle also writes about other moments in her life, including the time she contracted polio at the age of 6. She said, “In my year, 33,000 children got the virus and as soon as I was diagnosed, I was rushed to an isolation hospital… two children died near me because they couldn’t breathe… and so when that happened, even though I was the age of six I had this sudden realization I’m being saved for something… we need all ask ourselves what are we being saved for because life is so short… I want all people to get across the idea that pain and hardship are here to be enjoyed in a sense because the alternative is to check out, and life is so short… So you have to enjoy every minute of it, like T.R. Roosevelt said, ‘Take a bite out of it and let it dribble down your chin.'”