Each of the three filmmakers wrote a scene drawing from Mrs. Hughes' memories. What follows is series of three cascading memory-scenes that link and overlap.

 

 

Gone Like a Breeze

 

When asked what her happiest moment was, Anne Hughes sits back in her wheelchair and ponders her life over the last 84 years. She smiles, remembering her two husbands.

 

“I married a nice boy who lived down the street from me my whole life and we had three children.That was a happy time.” But her tone of voice, her attitude, changed when she adds that their marriage ender due to his drinking. Mrs. Hughes and her husband were about to lose their home, yet her husband kept drinking. Never drink heavily, she says. It can get to you. “People will always give you a drink when they won’t even give you anything to eat or glass a water.”

 

She struggles to piece together details. She will stammer with words and her thoughts while trying to formulate sentences. What wer her brightest moments? She's not sure. She couldn’t remember exact dates or places of the marriage, for one thing, but kept insisting how beautiful her home was then and that she lived there for 14 years alone.

 

Mrs. Hughes's mood lightens up as she talks about her second husband. The couple dated two years before marrying. Yet again, she brings up alcohol and how this husband stayed away from it.  He wanted to take care of himself, but in a tragic irony, he died from tumor in his neck that he waited to have removed.

 

Mrs. Hughes misses her husband, but she is happy to be talking about him. Since not many visit her, she doesn’t get many opportunities to go down memory lane.

 

“I really miss him. I would go anywhere and do anything to get him back.”—Cole Underwood

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Mrs. Hughes will never forget how alcohol snatched her first husband out of her own arms. Her husband’s alcoholism happened over forty years ago, but she still remembers it as if it were yesterday. Mrs. Hughes has become friends with loneliness ever since she married her first husband. Whenever her first husband would go on an alcohol run, loneliness was there to comfort her.

 

One day Mrs. Hughes’s first husband ventured off to the liquor store, and did not return for a week. When he came back he cried, apologized, and said that he would never do it again. Their house was incomplete without her husband. The air in the house was filled with the despair of waiting up for him, only to figure out that he was not coming home. Her husband would come and go just like the breeze that would flow by their house.

 

After this became a reoccurring pattern, Mrs. Hughes could no longer believe his stories. He lost his job, and came back crying again. He died early shortly after they separated. Before his death, Mrs. Hughes’s husband went to the hospital. He didn’t give any information about his ex-wife or his children. Later, Mrs. Hughes received a phone call that her ex-husband was in the hospital and wasn’t going to make it. She couldn’t go see him that day because she knew that she would have cried. Whether it was in a frigid hospital room, an empty house, or her room in the retirement home, Mrs. Hughes must make herself comfortable. She is used to feeling lonely.—Todd Smith

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He stumbled home late that night with the smell of whiskey on his breath. He told her they would soon lose their home because they couldn’t afford it any longer. She cried, devastated at who the man she loved had become. How could he let their family reach poverty for his selfish, alcoholic body?

 

Ann Hughes loved her first husband from the day she met him. They grew up on the same street, and got married when they reached an appropriate age.

 

After three children, he turned to alcohol. The day he announced the loss of their home, Mrs. Hughes knew what they had to do: divorce. With a broken heart and tears in her eyes, she handed him the papers with an empty line for his signature.

 

Over a year later, Mrs. Hughes received a call from a hospital in Florida.

 

“Do you know this man?” they asked.

 

She verified that she knew him. The nurse on the other end of the line said, “He won’t give us any other names or any relatives. He has only told us that you have children together, and that you’re a good mother.”

 

Hughes burst into tears. She knew his time had come. Though she can’t remember what, the doctors told her he died of something related to alcohol.

 

“I loved him, but he just couldn’t leave the alcohol alone...I would go anywhere to get him back.”—Summer Strickland ◊