little tigers

my husband has been rereading marcel pagnol’s memoir “the glory of my father.”  in the story, the young marcel’s mother is terrified of “les microbes,”  or germs, because, “the great Pasteur had just recently invented them.” steve translated a passage from the book the other night, in which marcel’s mother imagines germs as little tigers, ready to devour her children from the inside. i think dried clematis flowers are a pretty good approximation of what these “petits tigres”  must have looked like inside the head of the simple, loving, and terrified augustine pagnol, who scrubbed everything new that entered her house with bleach.

dried clematis