It all began before daybreak on a February morning in 1928, in an old house that was far too well ventilated in winter's cold.

I fell in love with books at an early age because my mother, a gifted reader, carried us four kids and my father to worlds far different from our world of the 1930's. Though I grumbled like other kids about having to go to school, I loved it, but had enough smarts not to admit it.

On graduating from high school, I found a small Methodist college that offered me room, board, and tuition in exchange for work. Early in my sophomore year, I was given work in the college library, a job I fell in love with. Because I wanted to become a thinker, for reasons I still don't understand, I spent a great deal of time reading philosophy, sometimes to the detriment of a higher GPA.

I had wanted to write since my mid-teens, but there were lots of things I wanted to do. To marry my first love as soon as I had a secure job as a teacher, and to become a school counselor because I'd been the sort of kid that surely needed one at times.

A trip to Mobile, Alabama was a time of falling in love with azaleas and camellias. Rhododendrons in North Carolina and it was love at first sight. Nothing would do but that I start growing them. But “It can't be done in the steamy, hot summers where you live,” I was told. For eighteen years I marketed about twenty varieties that had been propagated and grown on my twenty-one acres of wooded property. A good many of my rhododendron plants make their home at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, which granted me a lifetime membership with the Botanical Society.

Too many hours spent fishing and daydreaming about fishing, and I still had not written my novel. There were just too many things I loved to do.

Eventually, I became my wife's caregiver. Alzheimer's disease was destroying her brain. The once bright lights of her mind were going out . . . one at a time, never to return.

My first novel was finally written during the advanced stage of the disease and published years after her death. During my eighty-fifth year, I wrote a second novel, The Lingering Cloud, a story I could not have told ten years earlier. What would have been difficult to write in my seventies now flows far easier. My third novel, Memories from the Great Depression, is becoming far different from the other stories I've read of that era (1929-1939).

And afterward? If God continues to grant me the health and the time . . . I get excited just thinking about it! It's been one heckuva ride!

“In Hughes’ (Mindful of Him, 2011) latest novel, The Lingering Cloud, a young preacher discovers on his wedding night that he’s married a woman with a serious mental illness. Newlyweds Mack and Rebecca Baldwin, both 22, are spending their first night as man and wife when she explains that she strongly believes that sex is sinful. After Rebecca’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic, she’s diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized. Hughes is a terrific storyteller and an even better crafter of characters. In Mack, he has performed the near miracle of portraying a preacher who’s not preachy. Loyal to his wife and his Lord, Mack wrestles with issues of duty, grief and faith. When he has a moral lapse after years of absolute devotion to Rebecca, who contracts Alzheimer’s later in life, it’s impossible to judge him harshly, even though he berates himself. Older, wiser characters who counsel Mack are a joy to read about. Hughes’ description of the outdoors are often lovely, as in this Gulf Coast scene: “Nowhere was the passing of day into the night more beautiful nor more sweetly sad than when it sank into the ocean?so different than on land.” An elegant, tenderly, written story of love and loss.”
– Kirkus Reviews