The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men –some in their brushed Confederate uniforms–on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

From “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner

Faulkner describes a pathetic funeral. He concentrates on the very old men, which seems to populate most funeral homes as if wakes were part sadness and part entertainment.  “The very old men –some in their brushed Confederate uniforms–on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps …” Faulkner –-who, in my modest opinion, abuses the use  of similes in his, otherwise, tremendously powerful writing— describes their memory loss as a winterless meadow, a scenery that we look at with nostalgia.  Yet those days were as good and as bad as they are nowadays.