It’s On. Again. by The Pioneer Woman

I know it’s difficult for some people to understand a married couple pranking each other with fake snakes.

Actually, I don’t really understand it either. All I know is, Marlboro Man and I have perpetrated this prank against each other for years. Decades, even! (Yes, we have officially been married for decades. Only two decades, but decades nonetheless.)

Like many marital feuds, I can’t even remember what or who started it. But somewhere along the way, one of us thought it would be funny to plant a small rubber snake in a place where the other person would be surprised by it. Under a pillow, inside the shower, in the console of a pickup…I can’t remember which. Then the person who was pranked jumped or otherwise reacted just enough to cause the pranker to laugh…and with that, a war was started.

One of the best moments (for Marlboro Man at least) was when I planted a small rubber snake under the quilt on his side of the bed and he discovered it when he pulled back his side of the covers to get into bed. That wasn’t the part he liked; What he liked was that after I stopped laughing at his reaction (which is always kind of a manly mini-jump) he in turn placed the snake on the floor on my side of the bed, so when I came to bed after brushing my teeth a few minutes later, I almost stepped on it, screamed, and jumped on the bed because I thought it was a snake. So I basically scared myself, effectively.

Which totally negates the concern that our pranking each other through the years would desensitize us to the threat of real snakes. Maybe, it has been suggested, we will grow so weary from seeing fake snakes that we won’t take the threat seriously anymore and won’t know a real snake when we see one. But I have found the opposite is true. Along with our fear of real snakes (which is an innate human instinct, I believe, and which is even more profound in people who live in the country), we have actually developed a fear of fake snakes. Not because we are scared of plastic toys, but because we are deathly afraid of being one-upped by the other. So we are even more vigilant than the typical fearer-of-snakes: Not only do we fear real snakes, we fear fake ones.

Gosh, we lead exciting lives out here!