Smoke had erased the farthest mountains. From the passenger seat of the rented car, Wendie watched another ridge disappear. Black trees stood close to the road, their branches lifted into a sky without colour.
She lowered the window. The smell entered first—burnt wood, hot stone, something bitter beneath both. For a moment she kept looking. Then she closed her eyes.
It could have happened that way.
But it did not.
Gathering of the Elders, Chinese Ink on watercolour Paper, 14 x 14 inches, Copyright Wendie Donabie.
I never sat in that car. We changed our plans before the journey began.
Now I am standing in my studio in front of three small canvases. A notebook lies open beside them. A brush rests in my right hand and a pen in my left, and I no longer know whether I am painting or writing.
I pick up a tube of green and break the seal. Before the colour reaches the palette, the smell carries me into my uncle’s studio. I am young again, standing among his paintings. I never took lessons from him. I remember no particular canvas. What I remember most is the strange, alluring smell of oil paint—and how I wanted to stay in that room a little longer.
Today, I have four of my uncle’s paintings—two oils and two watercolours. He gave me the two watercolours as gifts: one after my father died, when I was fifteen; the other when I was eighteen, after I admired a painting he had made for an art show.
Years later, in Muskoka, I stand before paintings by Pat Fairhead. Their colours refuse to stay still. They press against their edges and change the air around them. I begin taking lessons from her. My work never resembles hers, but soon there are canvases of my own: fungi rising from fallen wood, a heron standing in a river, waiting patiently for a fish to arrive, trees caught between one season and the next.
Patience - Making Strides, Acrylic on Canvas Board, 12 x 16 inches, Copyright Wendie Donabie.
The green touches the palette.
I see soil.
My father is kneeling beside the oak outside our house in Batawa. The ground is mostly limestone, so my parents have brought in topsoil for a lawn. The workers spread it across the yard, closer and closer to the trunk, until my father stops them.
He begins to dig.
He clears the new earth from around the oak and builds a well, leaving an open circle around its base. In the years that follow, the tree fills my bedroom window. Its branches cross the glass and travel over my wall at night.
A Baltimore oriole hangs its woven nest among the leaves. Another spring, young robins fall. My father builds a small enclosure around them and keeps it there until the day the air receives them.
Woven Path, 40 x 30 inches, Acrylic on Canvas, Copyright Wendie Donabie.
On the canvas in front of me, there is still nothing.
I move the brush toward it, then notice a photograph leaning against the wall: a doe with two fawns.
The kitchen window is open again. The doe passes beside our house in Bracebridge, and I reach for my camera. By the time I step outside, the fawns have drawn close to her body. One looks left, the other right. Their mother stands between them, her ears turning toward every sound.
I speak softly. She knows my voice.
She does not run.
For several seconds, none of us moves. Then the shutter opens and closes.
Later, the three deer enter a painting. A woman from Bracebridge buys it, and when she moves away, she carries them with her. They leave town without taking another step.
Magical Meeting, Acrylic on Canvas,20 x 16 inches, Copyright Wendie Donabie.
I lay the photograph face down and squeeze blue beside the green.
The blue carries me to another canvas, a larger one covered in transparent layers of green and blue. Loose coils pass through the layers like strands of DNA. I keep adding colour, then removing it. Nothing brings the work to rest.
For two years, the canvas waits in a closet.
Then John Denver’s voice fills the room. He is singing about humpback whales. Before the song ends, I know where the mother will be and where her calf will swim. I pull the canvas from the closet. Their bodies emerge over the coils, one above the other, moving through the same blue.
Genesis, Acrylic on Canvas, 24 x 30 inches, Copyright Wendie Donabie.
The pen is in my hand now.
Words begin where the painting stops: poems, pieces of prose, sentences written beside photographs. Some arrive during several twelve-hour poetry half-marathons; others wait for months. Eventually, they gather under one title: Views from the Edge of the Earth.
I write the title again in the notebook.
Outside the studio, the afternoon has dimmed. On the palette, the green has touched a streak of grey.
The grey brings back a television screen: fire moving through western forests, smoke folding over the Rockies. My husband and I are meant to rent a car and drive through those mountains. We change the plan. Even if the fires have ended by then, even if the roads are clear, I know I will search each slope for the trees no longer there.
The imagined car carries on without us. Somewhere inside it, a woman closes her eyes.
In the studio, mine remain open.
The three canvases are waiting. The notebook is no longer blank. I draw the brush through green, blue and grey. The colours meet but do not disappear into one another.
The first mark crosses the white.
It might become a tree, the back of a deer, the dark curve of a whale. It might become none of them. For now, it is only colour, and the old scent rising.
My own voice echoes in my mind.
I will paint again—even if I am standing at the edge of the earth.
YF, September 18, 2026
Note: This story is based on an interview with Wendie Donabie and was shaped by the writer using literary storytelling techniques.
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