"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."

a rose for emily,
william faulkner
1930