19.5.10

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.)

9 comments:

The Mad Scorpion said...

Bubble Bubble, Toil and Trouble,
The Oil Gush is bursting
our financial bubble!!!

Poor, Poor B.P.
I guess they will have to go to their Chalet's in the mountains and have a good long hard think about what they've done... while being waited on hand and foot and relaxing in their bubble baths.

CiCi said...

I will check out the blog you recommend. Being bohemian sounds pretty cool to me. I am a leftover hippie and I like it. Your house sounds great. And wow, you have apple trees? We don't have fruit trees but we do bake our own bread.

Jacqui said...

LOL, that kind of sounds like a good chunk of New Zealand actually. We're all bohemians and we didn't even know it!

Amy said...

Love being bohemian- sounds good to me :-)
I have two lemon trees here that I plan on making lemon honey with in the winter.

Secret Mom Thoughts said...

Sounds like a great place to live.

injaynesworld said...

Sounds like a little slice of heaven.
Hope it stays that way. Don't let any of the bastard oil companies drill off your coast. I wrote about BP today.

On another note, I live on a lovely lavender farm in the middle of wine country in central California. This is also the time of year all the new foals are being born and it's such a delight to see them in the fields at their mom's sides.

From AA to NZ said...

We live in the heart of big D and buy our driftwood at Pottery Barn, but I'm still "bohemian" when I wanna be.

Madame DeFarge said...

It sounds blissful. But I may need more shops to be truly happy. I'm so shallow.

Claudya Martinez said...

You are most definitely bohemian. Maybe you're neo-bohemian.