I enjoy musing upon old Dixie and the South. Much of my reading material stems from this era and I am drawn to the old ways, always in search of some remnant from old Dixie. This is a fictional account of a soldier returning to Florida after a long journey home from the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia in April of 1865.
"It was Palm Sunday and our long journey home was not lined with palms and shouts of joy, but littered with the charred stubble of cotton fields, the rubble of a lost cause strewn before us, not the Kingdom of Jubilee we had fought for, the old home place on her last breath of an iron-lunged re-construction. Not even old Gabriel the family mule to lift the joist to level the sunken porch, taken to bear the strain for the rogues now in control. In the overgrown grass out back, I bent and picked some of the wild hurricane lilies growing under the pecan canopy. I found one of the few unbroken jars and made an arrangement. It stood in stark contrast. But I knew the rubble called the South would some day, like these white lilies, rise despite the hurricane that came upon us, and bring again a beauty to the land of Dixie.
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