The side-kick of hustle would be Chutzpah. The wonderful Yiddish term means “extreme self confidence or audacity”, and if I were you, and you were hiring a designer, I would look, ask and demand for one with storied, historical and deliverable Chutzpah. Every year, on my first trip across a freshly thawed springtime lake, I hold my breath from Len’s Cove to the bend past Cow Island from where Ican see that our cottage is still standing. I really cannot concentrate on much else until that precise location, so it must have been right after that turn that I spotted a floating shape in the dark cold waters. It was a driftwood log, particularly dangerous to boaters, but not unusual before the waters are well travelled and combed. It was a beautiful one. The branches were gone, their phantom limbs polished down to rounded smooth nubs. The air side was sun bleached and the water side was grey with surface particles. I pulled it into the pontoon because it was my civic duty but also because it was a thing of beauty.
For years it stood four feet and some high as a statuesque pedestal for muskrat skulls and Robin eggs. I had left it at my brother’s cabin as that was where we summered until I found my own place a few islands over. Two summers ago upon visiting him I saw this piece lying down outside, too prickly to be a bench, too cumbersome to make sense..and I had an idea. One day this old-as-days log would take its’ deserved place in our lives. Hustle may have brought it home, but Chutzpah made it happen. I present to you our Living Room coffee table, Canadian grown, Canadian dreamt, Canadian drawn and Canadian made.