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You are here: Home / New Mexico / The Paper Carrier’s Prayer

The Paper Carrier’s Prayer

December 17th, 2020 by Sallie Bingham in New Mexico Leave a Comment

Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper logoFor more years than I can remember, Yolanda Archuleta has delivered my daily Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper, driving long before daylight through snowstorms and hailstorms and almost impassable streets. I’ve never met Yolanda; the paper arrives with a thud outside my door around 3am and if I’m awake at that witching hour, I hear the thud and find it comforting. It’s also comforting to walk out through new glittering snow to pick up the paper in its blue plastic sleeve and carry it in to read with my breakfast.

Every year at about this time, Yolanda leaves a typed note with the paper. Yesterday it read, “It has been a pleasure serving you. I always strive to meet your expectations and meet your requirements and if there is anything else I can do, please do inform me.” This, to people she has probably never met and never will meet!

This year, she included a prayer: “when I wash my hands, I say this 20-second prayer.”

As I take up my hands
to wash them and
reassure my heart,
I pray for healing and wholeness
for the whole world.
I remember that every life
is unique and of infinite value:
from those living
in the most remote part of the globe
to those in our cities
to our neighbors and family members.
Let me use my hands for good
to help bring love
and compassion to others.
“Let us lift up
our hearts and hands
to the Eternal.” (Lamentations 3:41)

Every year at about this time, Yolanda leaves a typed note with the newspaper.

Yolanda reminds me of the need to feel and express gratitude for her service, and also for the graceful curves her car’s tires make in the driveway outside my front door—

as well as for the hour-glass shaped track in the snow left by a tiny mouse, running to escape freezing, that did not escape and lay dead and frozen at the bottom of her last curve;

and for the other tiny mice that gather up the seeds dropped under my bird feeder, and the almost equally tiny birds who search for seeds there—and whether the mice and the birds see each other is a mystery;

and for the gleaming puff of smoke I see from a neighbor’s chimney on the other side of the nearest hill at breakfast time these cold mornings;

and for all of you, my faithful readers whom I don’t see and usually don’t know, who stay by me in spirit in these extraordinary times by reading what I write.

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A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

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Watch Sallie

Taken By The Shawnee

Taken By The Shawnee

July 6th, 2025
Sallie Bingham introduces and reads from her latest work, Taken by the Shawnee.
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Visiting Linda Stein

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Rebecca Reynolds & Salie Bingham at SOMOS

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This event was recorded November 1, 2024 in Taos, NM at SOMOS Salon & Bookshop by KCEI Radio, Red River/Taos and broadcast on November 8, 2024.
Taken by the Shawnee Reading

Taken by the Shawnee Reading

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This reading took place at The Church of the Holy Faith in Santa Fe, New Mexico in August of 2024.

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Years ago a man I was in love with persuaded me to have a large fish pond dug near my studio. I think it was his attempt to be part of my necessarily solitary life there; like other such attempts it failed—and now I'm left with the fish pond! https://buff.ly/fGgnN39 #Koi #KoiPond

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Pasatiempo, The Santa Fe New Mexican

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