I’m terrible at being quiet.

Actually, I’m incredible at being quiet. I can go hours without feeling the need to mutter a word, I can stealthily slink around our home and farm so silently My Someone is constantly hollaring out to find me when I’m in the next room.

We have a tiny home, friends, that’s quiet (get it?!) impressive.

That is until I need to be quiet. And then I suck at being quiet. Strap some roller skates on my feet, arm me with a running chainsaw and set me free in this house because I’m making ALL THE NOISE up in here.

Thankfully, my days of need-to-be quiet are few and I can track them by flocks. Yes flocks. Flocks of chickens. The days I have to be quiet are the mornings following the nights all houses of chickens were shipped out.

(Shipping chickens means our houses of full grown chickens are rounded up and sent off to be processed.)

There is no written rule in our home saying I HAVE to be quiet the morning after chickens are shipped, but it is out of respect. You’d feel the need to keep silent too if your spouse spent the whole day before working, came home for a couple of hours and then went back to working from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.

No one wants to deal with a cranky, sleep-deprived roommate.

Today is one of those days. The Danielle needs to be quiet until Sleepy Beauty awakes from his slumber days.

The dogs have bounced off all the doors. Oliver has ran laps around the house barking ferociously at anything that looks suspicious. Blowing grass, y’all. Blowing grass is suspicious to my Terror.

The coffee maker beeped a little louder than normal when it was finished. I didn’t catch the microwave door before the buzzer went off.

I’m recovering from a cold, so try as I might, the hacking, coughing and nose blowing ricochets off the wall, like an echo in the cave.

Sometime around 8 a.m. I realized the inevitable couldn’t be prolonged any longer, I must get dressed for the day. I slipped through the door. Sorted through the laundry pile for jeans.
Knocked the laundry pile off the dresser and onto the floor.
Stood in silent terror at all the noise I had just made.
Grabbed the rest of my clothes and made my way to the bathroom.

I knew getting ready in the bathroom was a no-go since it is open to our bedroom where my mouth-breathing husband lay silently on his back. So I hustled to pile up all my toiletries, which conveniently had made their way to the bottom of the bathroom drawer. With each jumble of the drawer’s contents as a quickly tried to locate my essentials, the light sleeper I’m married too, toss and turned, annoyed, in our bed.

Successfully locating the pesky deodorant that had been hiding from me, I grabbed all my daily items and hustled towards the bedroom door. In my concentration of trying to slide the bedroom door shut without a sound, my straightener plunged out of my arms, crashed onto my right foot and bounced off onto the floor. I sucked in air and cussed and then peeked back through the still-not-shut bedroom door to find the blue-eyes of My Someone looking back.

“Hi,” he said nonchalantly.

“Hi,” I replied with a mixture of pain and embarrassment.

He closed he eyes, I closed the door and carried about my morning. It was all going so well an hour later when I decided to take a break from work to file paperwork.

The mountain of paperwork I had been putting off dealing with for months ALL crashed down off the printer table, like a game of life-sized Jenga gone terribly wrong, as soon as I grabbed one piece.

Naturally, in my attempt to clean it up tripped over my light stands and tripod I had conveniently left in the middle of the office floor, adding even more noise to my chaos.

At this point, I threw in the towel.

If you’re looking for me, I’m sitting on the opposite end of out house, with my laptop, resisting every urge I have to vacuum.

Oy.