This bohemian life

On a recent post at the excellent Irretrievably Broken (you should be reading this blog), there is a description of a “bohemian” childhood in Montana, where wood was used for fuel, and everything was hung outside to dry.

Wait one hot minute, I said to myself. That's our life. We use wood to heat our house. We hang our washing out on the line, to dry in the wind and sun.

We are bohemians!

Our house is shabby, but it is made of native timbers like rimu and maitai. And we live on a coastal plain surrounded by hills. There are daffodils, poppies, nasturtium, and geranium bushes in our garden. We have pohutukawa trees and flax bushes. We watch tuis swooping in the kowhai trees down the back. We pick apples from fruit trees, and make apple sauce or apple crumble. And we pick cape gooseberries and make our own jam. We bake our own bread.

Most people have large vegetable gardens. They might have a spa bath outside, maybe sheltered by rose bushes. And they probably have a studio in the shed out the back, where they paint, or practice piano. They might knit, or sew.

Sometimes we go fishing at the beach. Or we collect driftwood to make into furniture. We pick up shells to scatter on garden paths. Sometimes our neighbour’s chickens wander over to our garden. Someone might ride his horse up our street and back to the paddocks in the park. And our neighbours are interesting bohemian people—artists, musicians, writers, expatriates.

Walking home along the beach after dropping off Five at school.

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Edited to add: Sorry about the crap photo, but I was trying to capture the essence of the waves. I thought the waves looked like plumes. Or how plumes should look. (Instead of, you know, plumes of oil in a ecological disaster that just keeps getting worse.)