Walking Each Other Home

by Ann Boaden

Written for Rev. Bunny Hughes, former student and friend

“We are walking each other home,”
she used to say. It was a long walk,
between shadows of green thoughts,
midsummer dawns of peach and plum,
blue dusks, wine-dark nights,
with the deep scatter of stars
whose dust is our bones.
And then the fall, and the birds homing
south to the light,
sweeping like brown leaves across the grass,
gleaning earth’s last plenty before
spiraling into sky. The day
leans now on stripped branches,
is thinned as old skin. And she
and I, like Besties at the end of school,
have parted at her door. Lights shine
from welcoming windows. For her, clear.
For me, through a glass, darkly.

Isabel “Bunny” Catherine Hughes (July 30, 1952 – November 20, 2025) was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Augustana College (1974), as well as North Park Theological Seminary (M.Div., 2010) where she received both the preaching and church history awards. She worked as a junior high English teacher, youth minister, hospice volunteer, and teacher’s aide in a kindergarten classroom. Later as an ordained minister, Bunny served several churches in Illinois, including the Edgebrook Covenant Church, Chicago; Saint Luke’s Christian Community Church, Morton Grove; Morton Grove Community Church, Morton Grove; Community Presbyterian Church, Lombard; and Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Park Ridge.