Olivier Saillard

Olivier: Late at night or early in the morning, Sundays would begin with the delivery of the daily newspaper.
My mother, who had taken up the job of taxi driver out of a desire for independence, would carry out this weekly Sunday task. In every village, lost amidst the snow and the cold, I would help her, sometimes reluctantly as I’d often have a night out at a nightclub followed straight by the round… But I was always rewarded by the slow rise of the sun over the white, silent snow. Despite the treacherous roads and ruts, despite the cold – it was regularly thirty degrees below zero – I have fond and warm memories of my mother and me driving along at a measured pace in the silence. From hamlets to villages, where the distributors of the regional newspaper awaited us in the neighbouring farms, we would share a large bowl of black coffee, comforting and hot. Standing around a corner of the table and a worn oilcloth, we would each take a sip of the piping-hot, delicious coffee, burning our lips as we did so. From the coffee pots resting on the cast-iron tops of the wood-burning stoves, the aromas wafted out, mingling with the smell of embers. In Chapelle des Bois, a small, remote village in the Haut Doubs, in what is known as ‘Little Siberia’, we allowed ourselves to savour the complimentary coffee a little longer. Chapelle des Bois marked the end of the tour. The mesmerising white snow, the sky gradually turning a deep blue, and the inky-black coffee all proclaimed in unison that the world was waking up.