We’ve all heard about the folks who leave the beautiful and healthy rural surroundings where they grew up and go to the city to make a fortune so they can move back to the farm. It happens all the time, especially in upstate New York. Even more often, city-bred people decide that the country life is for them and encamp to a second home, weekend getaway or reconditioned old farmhouse. Sometimes they even become members of the community.

Jim Mullen and his wife Susan had been living in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village for many years, and mingled with the cosmopolitan crowd during weekends in The Hamptons (a fashionable gathering-place on eastern Long Island, not to be confused with the city of Binghampton). Their life was urban and urbane, but out on The Island they never shook the city’s tensions. So Sue decided to explore the possibilities three hours in the other direction. They rented a car (no point owning a car in Manhattan – Jim didn’t even have a driver’s license) and headed northwest on Route 17. They’ve been living here ever since, which is something of a miracle, and a story worth telling.

“It Takes a Village Idiot: A Memoir of Life After the City” is humorist Jim Mullen’s account of adding confusion to stress as he sheds his city ways and settles into an earthy environment. Mullen writes a syndicated column called “The Village Idiot” and was for many years author of the “Hot Sheet” column in Entertainment Weekly. He has written for The New York Times and New York Magazine. Nothing prepared him for the busy bucolic life he finds in the town he calls Walleye in “Catskill County”. (In real-life, Mullen lives in Franklin, NY in Delaware County.) But the mythical places he has created along Spilt Milk Road ring absolutely true, from the off-off-brands at the local general store to the uncertainty about identifying poison ivy to the custom of waving at everyone as you drive down the road.

In the city life was full but limited by crowds and congestion and the weirdoes on every block. Life in the Catskills would include auctions at the Grange, gardens devoured by deer and mice in the mudroom. But eventually the Mullens decide to sell their Greenwich Village apartment and accept the rural life in their mountain village, complete with ice storms in November.

“It Takes a Village Idiot” was a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Jim Mullen’s other books include “Baby’s First Tattoo: A Memory Book for Modern Parents” and “My First Wedding”, a planner that includes a list of colors that make all women look unattractive, and advice for calling the whole thing off.

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