In "A Rose for Emily" what does the author mean when he says "a huge meadow which no winter ever touches"?

In Section V of "A Rose for Emily," the funeral for Emily Grierson is held.  The old servant lets the "sibilant" women in and "walked right through the house and out the back was not seen again."  This action of the "Negro" signifies the further end of the Old South with Emily's death.  Likewise, as the last vestiges of the Old South, the "very old men" in their Confederate uniforms attend the funeral. Sitting on the lawn they speak of Miss Emily as though she has been a contemporary of theirs, but they have lost their sense of time

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.

The memories of the aged are selective and subjective.  Like a green meadow, they are romantic, fresh, lively, and pleasant.  These memories are of their glorious and happy youth, separated from the reality of old age, the "narrow bottle-neck" of the present that, for them, is winter as it represents the end of their era, with their eventual death ahead.