The Cruelest Year
by Debbie Weingarten
Mandy Cano Villalobos, Penance X, paper scorched by hand, 20 x 24 inches, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
THE CRUELEST YEAR
DEBBIE WEINGARTEN | SEPT 2022 | Issue 18
It was the cruelest year. And cruel beget cruel. By mid-summer, it’s true — I wanted everyone else to suffer the way we had.
I first made the creek rise. From my bed, I drowned the mossy banks and the honeysuckle, the new little frogs perched on their wet rocks. The creek became a small river, and then a bigger one. I screamed into my pillow, and the current pushed against the old rope swing tree until it uprooted and fell, the sound loud as a firework.
But I was not finished. I had never been so full of fury. I wanted to take their daughters, but I could not, so for a time I took their water. It was already a hot, dry summer, but for sixty days, I did not let rain fall in middle Ohio. Farmhouse hydrangeas sagged, alfalfa shriveled, corn withered. Cracks spidered across the dry, brown fields. Cows collapsed. Grandmothers heatstroked. Babies could not sleep in that miserable, inescapable heat.
I admit all of this without remorse, because eventually, I gave them their water back. Their drought was temporary, nothing compared to mine.
A dead daughter is forever.
Debbie Weingarten’s journalism and creative nonfiction writing has been featured in numerous outlets, including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Longreads, Guernica, New York Review of Books, as well as the 2016 and 2017 Best of Food Writing anthologies and the Dear America anthology, published by Trinity Press. She was a finalist for a 2019 James Beard Award for Investigative Reporting and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a writing partner with the Female Farmer Project, and writer/producer for the full-length documentary Women’s Work: The Untold Story of America’s Female Farmers. She is currently at work on a memoir-in-essays and two novels. After sixteen formative years in the southern Arizona desert, she recently moved back to Western North Carolina, where she’s trying to remember what to wear in the winter.
Mandy Cano Villalobos is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans installation, 2D, performance, and sculpture. Her projects explore ideas of home, memory and cultural identity. Cano Villalobos has exhibited in venues including Bridge Projects (Los Angeles, CA), POSITIONS Art Fair (Berlin, DE), Proyecto T (Mexico City, DF), the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum (Clinton, NY), Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD), the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, (Chicago), The Museum of New Art (Detroit, MI), Hillyer Art Space (Washington, DC), Gray Contemporary (Houston, TX) and La Casa Pauly (Puerto Montt, Chile). Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Sculpture Magazine, Hyperallergic, and The Chicago Reader, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship, and has been awarded grants from multiple organizations including the Gottlieb, Puffin, Frey, and Chenven Foundations, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Cano Villalobos is represented by Mu Gallery in Chicago and drj art projects in Berlin. She works in Grand Rapids, MI and Brooklyn, NY.