Yesterday, after I got a few tasks done around the house, I took the bus to IKEA. The official purpose was to get a high stool for my kitchen island, but that was just that day’s excuse for getting out of the house.

The bus was quieter than I expected for a so-called Black Friday, but I should have realized it was a work holiday. When I boarded, the driver asked me how I was doing and said, “It’s chilly!” which it was. Cold, clear, absolutely end-of-November.

As I took my seat in the senior citizen section, I heard him ranting incomprehensibly about what I had said. I didn’t pay any attention. He did something similar to the next person who told him it was cold out, so that was all right. And then he berated another man just getting on, apparently for not asking him how he was doing and for not saying “Good morning.” That passenger, a dignified person, dutifully said, “Good morning” and asked him how he was doing, though he had already said it once, though more quietly.

The woman sitting next to me on the bus was humming, so I muted my hearing aids and listened to a podcast in French, to drown her out. I can’t stand people humming. When my mother was feeling helpless, frustrated and annoyed, she started humming. She couldn’t very well play the piano, as she used to when I was a kid, when she was ready to leave and everyone else was still running around.

I will forever associate short Chopin, Bach, and Beethoven piano pieces with being rushed, and I will forever associate humming with my angry, nearly paralyzed Parkinsonism mother in the back seat of my car, getting annoyed because she couldn’t keep up with my conversation with my husband.

The driver continued to berate people as he drove along, but he was in a good mood otherwise, and so was everyone else. I remembered to unmute my hearing aids when I got off the bus.

In IKEA, I had lunch, as one does, and tried to figure out what language the family near me was speaking (Serbian, probably). I eventually located the stool in the vast shelving area, and bore it out triumphantly in its flat pack, going through the self checkout. You can carry all kinds of things on the bus, but only as long as you don’t have more than one of them, which is another excuse I have for getting out of the house on the regular.

On the bus back, I had a quieter bus driver, but another woman near me started humming, hymns I think, so I muted my hearing aids again. They are marvels of technology, those aids. The Bluetooth app that comes with them allows me to increase the volume, increase the tones that make speech more understandable in bus restaurants, turn the volume down entirely, and use all kinds of other features that I don’t remember because I rarely use them.

I got home and got to work, playing music on my wireless speaker to keep me company. The artificial Christmas tree was up and decorated, the stool was assembled, the trash was out on the curb, and I was wondering vaguely what I should do to fix the speaker, because it was sounding as if it was playing under water.

I had moved the speaker to a different place in the house, so maybe that was it. There is some way to reset the speaker back to default values. I didn’t feel like stopping and figuring it out just then, so I just contented myself with music that was a vague mutter. It was like the bus driver or the humming ladies: just background noise.

When I was finished, I looked about me. My house was prepared for the depths of winter. The battery-operated candles were flickering, the tree was gleaming quietly, the YouTube fireplace was flaming and popping on my laptop, and I had put a side lamp in the kitchen so that the cheap wood cabinets didn’t look nearly as bad as usual. My stool was perched at the end of the cart, looking elegant and old-fashioned. The house was quiet and the world was calm, as the Wallace Stevens poem puts it.

It wasn’t until I went upstairs to take a shower, and took my hearing aids out so they wouldn’t get wet, that I realized I hadn’t unmuted them for eight hours, not since the last hummer. No wonder the damn house was so quiet and calm.

Except for telling the driver that it was chilly, I hadn’t spoken to a human being all day, and for the most part, I didn’t bother to listen to a human being all day, either. I could have been living in a cabin in a wilderness, instead of the sixth-largest US city. I don’t need to retire to the country to have peace, apparently. I just have to turn off my hearing aids.