Back to the Prairie: A Home Remade, A Life Rediscovered - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Melissa Gilbert starred as Laura Ingalls Wilder on the hit NBC television show Little House on the Prairie. She has starred in numerous movies and plays and served two terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild. She is the author of Prairie Tale, Daisy and Josephine, My Prairie Cookbook, and Back to the Prairie. She resides in the Catskills and New York City with her husband, Timothy Busfield.

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1. Escape from New York

Escape from New York

Tim found the house on Zillow in early fall 2019, though calling the structure he saw a house is generous.

He was scrolling through properties in upstate New York. The Catskills, to be specific. We were living in New York City and wanted a second home where we could escape into peace, quiet, and nature. We wanted space to think and breathe and stillness to help us slow down. We wanted to recharge and feel inspired. That kind of thinking led us to the… house.

Scrolling through Zillow is something I have done since I heard that other people do it to pass the time. Like them, I look at homes around the world. Castles, mansions, lake homes, oceanfront palaces, architectural gems, my childhood homes, tree houses, houseboats, and cool-looking structures that are served up randomly.

It’s better than doomscrolling, which is about searching for and reading the endless flow of articles that confirm the world is screwed and so, by proxy, are we. Pick your poison. There are plenty out there. Global warming, pandemics, uncompromising politicians, the end of democracy, conspiracy theories. We didn’t need to get into doomscrolling the way others did. We could turn on our favorite cable news network for all the news that was fit to panic over.

Admittedly, some of that life-is-getting-out-of-control mindset did contribute to our desire to find a place outside of the city. Not too far, though. We didn’t want to be more than two or three hours away by car in case one or both of us had to work, cracked a tooth, or craved sushi. In that respect, we were kind of like kids learning to ride a two-wheeler bike, yelling at their parents, “Don’t let go! Don’t let go!” Then, suddenly, and without realizing, we were pedaling on our own in the country with gardens, chickens, and bears, oh my!

That’s kind of the whole story in a nutshell—but not really.

The story encompasses divorce, bloodshed, Botox, an unhealthy relationship, love, pulling up roots, marriage—or I should say remarriage—blended families, snakes, rodents, growing food, roosters and hens, power tools, generators, a pandemic, wild animals, and survival, among other things. Some might say this is about a midlife crisis. I call it a midlife reassessment of priorities and my realization that real satisfaction and meaning, for me, at fifty-six years old, came from canning tomatoes and cleaning the chicken coop rather than implants and hair color and other efforts to stop time from marching across my face.

The word that comes to mind is simplification.

I’m not sure getting to the point where I am now was always simple. But maybe it was. Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe the decisions we make, even the bad ones, are bread crumbs on the path we’re supposed to follow. Maybe I was destined to hear my husband, the actor, director, and shoulder-rubber extraordinaire Timothy Busfield, look up from the Zillow listing on his computer screen and say, “I think we should investigate this place.”

At that point, Tim and I, as a couple, were relative newcomers to New York, though we had both lived there for various stretches over the years. Married for five years, we had begun our legal life together in Michigan but transplanted ourselves to Manhattan after numerous conversations that went like this:

Tim: Where do you want to go for dinner tonight?

Me: New York.

Me: What do you want to do this weekend?

Tim: Go to New York.

Tim: Should we go to the movies tonight?

Me: Sure. What’s playing in New York?

So we went to New York, a fine place for two people in our line of work, though, after four years in Michigan’s slow lane, we weren’t sure that we wanted to stay. To underscore the point, we moved into an Airbnb in Harlem. It was the lowest-level commitment available. No first month’s rent, last month’s rent, security deposit, broker’s fee, bribes to the building’s board. In other words, none of the usual welcome-to–New York expenditures. It was like we were visiting. And almost immediately I was cast in a play. When that ended, I got another play. The message was as clear as my name was on the theater marquee. We decided to stay.

We found an apartment on the Upper West Side, which turned out to be too noisy. I actually listed our upstairs neighbors’ phone number in my contacts as “Stompers.” From there, we moved to a smaller one-bedroom, one-bath in a great building that’s in an equally great location, where we still rent. It’s a block and a half from the train station at Seventy-Second, which was convenient when I had to get to the theater, or anywhere, for that matter. The building is seven stories, with only four apartments on each floor, so we don’t have a ton of neighbors. They may say the same about us: We don’t have a ton of Melissa and Tim.

Both of us did well in the city. I had my theater routine and Tim was directing and acting on a variety of TV shows, including Law & Order: SVU. We were busy, and our friends and family kept us busier. One of our favorite things to do was to send out a group text saying that we were going to the five o’clock showing of whatever movie, and everybody, including Tim’s son Willy and my son Michael, both of whom had recently moved to New York, would meet at the theater, and we would go out to dinner en masse afterward. We had several groups of people and hung out all the time. We also went to the theater and the museums. We were a fiftysomething and a sixtysomething hanging out with twenty- and thirtysomethings along with folks our own age.

It was very fun, but even in the best of circumstances the city closes in on you. There is always someone on the other side of the wall, up above, or down below. Sidewalks are crowded, subway cars can feel more like stuffy petri dishes for cultivating odd spores and germs, and everything is kind of dirty and difficult. Not that we mind or complain. Tim and I chose life in the Big Apple. We hearted New York—the good, the bad, and the parts that occasionally made us feel like we were lucky to escape with our lives.

But living there can get intense and claustrophobic, and… and loud. I have hypersensitive hearing. Actually, I have misophonia, a condition that causes certain sounds to drive me absolutely insane. Like chewing sounds, the crunching of popcorn or tortilla chips, a certain frequency of television sound coming through the wall, or the droning of voices in that same tone.

Sirens, barking dogs, vacuum cleaners—they don’t register. It’s the weird stuff that makes me want to murder or run away. I’m a freak.

Tim can’t hear too awfully well. He has hearing aids but never wears them because… because why would he want to listen to me complain about things that I hear?

But he does like to get outside in the fresh air.

And so it became important for us to have a place where we could escape.

“We need space,” Tim said.

Back in Los Angeles, where I grew up, space meant a gleaming, white, five-thousand-square-foot Cape Cod–style farmhouse with a kitchen full of stainless steel appliances, including the de rigueur Wolf range, a media room, a wine cellar, a gym, a primary suite with a lavish spa-equivalent bathroom, a pool, an outdoor kitchen with a pizza oven, a...