What It Was Really Like Being Neighbors With Melissa Gilbert
On a Sunday morning in early December 2023, days after my husband Alan and I got the crushing news of the death of a close friend and colleague, our phones both chimed with a text. It was from Melissa Gilbert. You might know Melissa as the star of Little House on the Prairie. I know her as a most kind and generous neighbor.
“I’m making some comfort food for you guys," she wrote. "No need to even see me. I can just drop it off. Is there a time that’s best for you?"
This compassionate act did not surprise me; Melissa had been giving us neighborly nourishment in the form of food and friendship since October, when she, her husband and their two sweet dogs, Chicago and Sundance, moved into a rental a few blocks from our Albuquerque home. Alan and I had become friends with Melissa the year prior, when her husband, Tim Busfield, directed an episode of the second season of The Cleaning Lady, the show on which Alan is director of photography.
By the time the next season began filming, Melissa had chosen a home in our neighborhood. Tim would be here for the entirety of the seven-month run as producer/director, which meant Melissa would be here too — when she wasn’t busy with her own gigs.
The Celebrity Next Door
When I first met Melissa at a dinner Alan and I hosted at our home for his colleagues in 2022, I had never seen Little House on the Prairie. I am 42, so by the time I was 2, the show had finished airing its final season. I was born into a world already besotted with Laura Ingalls, the endearingly earnest child-character Melissa embodied. When I asked Tim and Melissa the story of their falling in love, Tim said she’s just like Laura — with her wonder and playfulness. And her pure heart.
As millions, including my parents and two older sisters, were tuning into the rare weekly show that convinced viewers of the radical belief that people are inherently good — that we should keep our faith in each other ever-alive — I was learning to talk and walk.
When I told my oldest sister, also a Melissa, that Melissa Gilbert and I were becoming friends, she said, “Oh my god, I wanted to be her when I was growing up!” I imagined my sister, 14 years older than me, as a teen on our family room’s carnation pink carpet, legs crisscrossed, engrossed by the other Melissa on our bulky TV screen, running through the tall grass, her braids swaying after her. Maybe a chubby baby me was crawling nearby, taking all that cozy hopefulness in.
By the time Melissa G. returned to Albuquerque for her second, extended stay in October, I had binge-watched a lot of season one of Little House, because, over Christmas of 2022, I’d had to hole up in my guest bedroom with COVID. When I was too congested to sleep, I propped myself up with pillows. Once I turned my attention to a soulful and wily 9-year-old Melissa cradling an orphaned raccoon to her chest, I forgot I was struggling to breathe.
Melissa shares Laura’s vast animal-loving capacity; it’s a quality I love about her. (She says she wants a pet otter.) And when I felt lonely in my holiday solitude, I watched Laura, her red-gold tresses draping her back in contrast to the usual pigtails, as she raced to the peak of a mountain to plead with God to take her life instead of her infirm baby brother’s. I’d like to be so noble-minded, I thought, and as a child! This felt like something the real Melissa — an adoring mother and grandmother — would do.
By the winter holidays of 2023, Melissa had become a neighbor in the ways you hear about in the days of yore, when neighbors cared less about fences and more about community. Sometimes she needed stamps; sometimes I needed someone to confide in, like the time I had my first terrifying callback after a mammogram. She texted to see if I needed anything from the local co-op; I texted to tell her there’s a full-spectrum ribbon of a rainbow looking east.
While she was here, I needed two root canals with a doctor an hour away in Santa Fe. When Melissa found out, she offered to drive me. I went without telling her, not wanting to inconvenience her. She seemed a little mad after the fact, but only in the nicest possible way.
Our Friendship Blossoms
I eventually grew more comfortable with taking what she gave because she just kept giving. One Saturday morning, someone knocked on our door. But no one knocks on our door. Except, apparently Melissa does. Alan and I were sipping coffee by the fire in our pajamas. Melissa handed us a giant paper bag of pastries from our favorite neighborhood café. She was wearing pajamas too, laughing at the coincidence. Our freezer had already been stocked by then with her tuna noodle casserole. The offers for comfort meals went on:
“How about dinner over here tomorrow? Cioppino, salad, crusty bread?”
“Sunday roast at our house at 4 p.m. Roast beef, roasted root vegetables, peas, gravy, horseradish sauce and rolls.”
And when word reached Melissa that my 15-year-old stepson devoured her homemade mac and cheese, she texted: “I hear the young man wants the rest of the mac and cheese! I will drop it by later. Say … noon-ish?”
This past Thanksgiving, Alan and I decided to host 30 people at our home. Melissa contributed stuffing, green bean casserole and two chess pies — all of which were hits. After we were full, she and I sang “Both Sides Now” at my piano for the group, and Tim played and sang a love song on the guitar that he’d written for Melissa. All our guests sat teary-eyed and transfixed, and she and I agreed it was one of the best Thanksgivings we’d ever had. But since I hadn’t been able to enjoy enough helpings of the turkey dinner, my favorite meal, due to rushing around as a host, Melissa and Tim invited Alan and me over for a repeat, just the four of us, for Christmas Day. After the meal was done, she sent us home with an abundance of leftovers.
I would come to understand that TV star or not, I’ve never had a neighborly someone check in on me like this, cook for me like this, remember important details of my life I’ve shared and follow up on them — except for my own family matriarchs, two of which are no longer alive. I felt a comfort from her that I thought only they could give. It’s as if their nourishing energies are being transmitted to me in another form, through another person, who happens to be Half Pint.
When The Cleaning Lady wrapped two months ago, and we didn’t yet know if the show would return, I felt a heaviness about Melissa leaving. We’d spent every holiday together in the past seven months, each of which, I’d been the beneficiary of her vibrant, mindful company and her cooking. For Superbowl Sunday, she’d brought warm crab dip. For Easter, she’d brought the best au gratin potatoes I’ve ever tasted.
When I planned Alan’s birthday brunch, I’d gone to Melissa for guidance like I’d consult my own family. I turned to her for recipes she’d used once when she’d had us over for brunch — eggs benedict casserole and gravlax (cured salmon). Speaking of salmon, the day before Christmas, a package with lox, cream cheese, and bagels from Melissa’s favorite New York City shop arrived on our doorstep. She’d listened when I’d lamented missing my east coast staples.
The Gift of Melissa Gilbert
Everyone should have a neighbor who whispers to them that they have a booger in their nose at a party, or one who presents them with a beautiful ring box for their dental crown that fell out, stuck to a piece of chewy candy, as mine did at her table when we were playing a board game. Everyone should have someone nearby who invites you to shop with them for laugh-inducing stocking stuffers for your husbands, but only after stopping for queso and margaritas first.
Yes, everyone should have a neighbor, who, when you stroll to a restaurant together, and stop and see a 3-year-old neighbor in striped pajamas, telling his dad he loves him, says to the child, “I love you.” The sentiment was genuinely appreciated by the strangers — because it was genuinely conveyed.
And what a great neighbor, who — when you meet her at her door to hand her back her slow cooker that once held transcendent crab dip (some of which you still have frozen) — listens when you tell her you think your lesson must be to learn to let go because you might have lost recordings of conversations with a loved one who has passed.
“Well, I don’t like that for you,” she says, not looking away. And you feel comforted.
During the handful of times I tried to give to her for just one second without her giving to me, she gave right back. Such as when I gave her a dozen eggs from our chickens, she took me out to dinner. Or when I made my Sicilian Sunday dinner recipe. I told her to bring nothing. She brought a star of the meal, just-out-of-the-oven rosemary garlic focaccia. A few days later, she handed me a Tupperware container of her homemade Bolognese sauce, which rivals my grandmother’s. An impossible seeming feat. Leave it to Melissa, whose initials match my gran’s (MG).
Perhaps the grand finale of Melissa’s stay steps from my house was the solar eclipse. While our dogs wrestled and chased on my back patio, she and I stared up through our cardboard glasses at the sun, as it diminished then expanded. We sang, “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” She pointed out the white-winged doves with frost blue-lined tangerine eyes collecting sticks and building nests. When the light eased back to bright, she leashed her dogs and walked home. I stayed home, returning to work. I’d forgotten to give her the stamp she needed so I brought it to her later, when I was out walking with my dogs, running errands. She was inside, making lasagna with béchamel sauce for a dinner guest. When she saw my eyes expand like the sun coming back after the eclipse reached totality, she said, “I’ll save a piece for you.”
Melissa left my neighborhood to return to New York two months ago, and with her absence, she left a void. But her good-heartedness still swells in my own heart, and will swell even more when I see her in person again soon, since I just found out The Cleaning Lady is renewed. In the meantime, when I miss her, I can always head to my freezer and heat up some au gratin potatoes, crab dip or tuna noodle casserole.
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