The Prank War on Our Street

The Head

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It appeared on our bookshelf sometime last year. Sitting right there in our sitting room, cool as you please — a wooden carved head, maybe five or six inches tall, completely unrecognizable and absolutely not ours. Jay and I both stared at it. We asked each other. We genuinely could not explain it. We’re reasonable adults. We have a nice home. We do not collect mysterious wooden heads.

“It sat there for MONTHS. Just… watching us. Like a tiny wooden roommate nobody invited.”

We had our suspicions. Our neighbor Jock has a history of being exactly the kind of person who would do something like this and then say absolutely nothing about it. Just let it marinate. So we waited. And that little wooden head watched us from the bookshelf, and we watched it back, and eventually we just… accepted it. It became part of the decor. Which, honestly, says a lot about us.

Fast forward to football season. Jock hosted a Green Bay Packer party — the whole neighborhood over, cocktails flowing, everyone in green and gold, hollering at the TV like that’s ever actually helped. The Packers had a terrific game. A really great game. Right up until the very end when they lost to the Chicago Bears. Which, if you know anything about Wisconsin, you understand is not just a loss. It is a spiritual injury.

What Jock did not know, what none of us knew except Jay, was that sometime during that party, my husband quietly slipped away and planted a small electronic device in Jock's guest bathroom. A device that, at completely random intervals, makes the sound of a cricket chirping.

Just… chirp. Silence. Chirp chirp. Silence. You’d almost think you imagined it.

Jock lives alone. Just him and his dog Holly. So there he is, Packers loss fresh in his soul, and somewhere in his house a cricket has apparently moved in. Holly, God love her, was probably losing her mind sniffing baseboards. Jock, being a determined man, was not going to let a cricket win.

“He removed the vent from his floor. The man got on his hands and knees and took off an actual floor vent to find this cricket.” No cricket behind the vent. Just a man, a confused dog, a Packer loss, and somewhere nearby — chirp.

Two or three days later, Jay’s phone buzzed. A text from Jock. I will not repeat it word for word, but the spirit of the message was: you are not a good person and I know exactly what you did.

Jay showed me the text. We laughed until we cried. And somewhere in that moment I thought — this. This is what I want to write about. Not a curated highlight reel. Not a perfectly styled tablescape with a candle I found at TJ Maxx. This. The real stuff. The pranks and the cocktails and the fire pits and the neighborhoods that become family when you weren’t even looking for one.

That’s Authentic Vibe Living. It’s me, Nikki, dispatcher by trade, reluctant cabin wife by marriage, enthusiastic cocktail enthusiast by choice with a penchant for high-quality glassware to make one feel ‘fanciful’ — figuring out this next chapter of life and bringing you along for every ridiculous, wonderful, occasionally chaotic minute of it.

Welcome to the neighborhood. Watch your vents.

First time here? Pull up a chair — there’s always room around our fire. Bonus points if you bring your own cornhole set.

— Nikki