A missionary barrel, a forgotten closet, and several decades’ worth of romantic bad decisions

My grandmother did not mean to introduce me to scandalous romance novels.

I am nearly certain of that.

She was a conservative Christian woman. She and my grandfather considered themselves missionaries, although their work centered on planting churches in small New Mexico communities. In every memory I have of her, her curls were pinned in place with bobby pins. She usually wore dark trousers and a long blouse, often with a cardigan, vest, or shawl layered over it. I have the photographs to prove this was her standard uniform.

She read her Bible and a small devotional book every day. She was not, so far as I knew, a reader of fiction. She did, however, love daytime soap operas.

I do not clearly remember my grandmother handing me a box of books. There is no vivid scene of cardboard flaps opening while dozens of scandalous paperbacks waited inside. I remember that she was visiting us in Texas from New Mexico, and that her visits felt special because they were rare.

Because of their missionary work, my grandparents sometimes received boxes of donated clothing and household goods—what my family still called a missionary barrel. I have a vague impression of clothes that seemed too adult and old-fashioned for me, and of my mother explaining the name.

In my childhood understanding, missionary barrels had once been literal barrels filled with useful things and sent to missionary families living far from familiar support. In my imagination, they traveled by train and carriage toward distant settlements, packed with dry goods, clothing, kitchenware, and whatever else a family might need.

By my grandmother’s time, the barrel itself had disappeared.

The name remained.

People still collected clothing and household goods for missionary families, although this particular collection did not feel like a carefully chosen treasury of useful things. It felt more like castoffs: items someone no longer wanted and my grandmother could not use.

The clothes were probably the intended gift.

The books appear to have traveled with them as stowaways.

My parents probably never examined those paperbacks closely. I cannot imagine they deliberately decided that a girl entering middle school should have unrestricted access to several decades’ worth of romantic bad decisions.

My mother seems to have stored the box in a closet. Then everyone forgot about it.

A Study for an Older Girl

At some point, my parents and I switched bedrooms.

The closet in my new room was not especially large, but it had deep shelves and a desk-like surface where I could pull up a stool. Older men’s suits still hung there, along with other remnants of the adults who had used the space before me. The closet had the worn brown feeling of old paper and old fabric, along with the faint smell of things that had belonged to other people for a long time.

It was the summer between elementary school and middle school, and I decided to turn part of the closet into a study.

Older girls, I apparently believed from television sitcoms and commercials, required organized shelves and private workspaces.

So I began arranging the books from the forgotten box.

They were mass-market paperbacks spread across several deep shelves. Their spines had been cracked by previous readers, but most were still in good condition. Some had dog-eared pages where previous readers had marked their places and intended to return.

I do not remember whether I arranged them by author, size, color, or some private system that made perfect sense only to me. I remember the act of organizing them more clearly than the finished arrangement.

Somewhere in the arranging, I began looking more closely at what the adults had unknowingly left for me to find.

Several Decades’ Worth of Romantic Bad Decisions

The collection was made up mostly of paperbacks from the 1970s and 1980s, with a few older books mixed in.

I remember the covers more clearly than I remember most of the stories.

There were women in white nightgowns surrounded by candlelight and heavy draperies. There were pastel Regency heroines pretending not to notice severe men standing near pianos. There were long-haired women whose gowns had lost every structural argument, held in the arms of tanned, muscular men who had misplaced their shirts.

Some of the covers were dramatic. Some were beautiful. Some were ridiculous. Many managed to be all three.

To a girl about to enter middle school, nipples, bulges, heated embraces, and women falling backward into muscular arms were scandalous enough. By the standards of some modern steamy romances, though, many of the books were probably tame.

What has aged most dramatically is not necessarily the sex.

It is the ideas.

The shelf contained plenty of old-fashioned—and sometimes genuinely bad—assumptions about women, men, power, desire, gender roles, and what love was supposed to excuse.

I did not have the language to recognize most of that then.

I was simply curious.

The First Story Pattern

The first book that truly held my attention was not one of the more obvious romances, but Zane Grey’s Under the Tonto Rim. I cannot say whether it was literally the first one I opened, but it was the book that made the rest of the shelf feel promising.

I tried rereading it recently. The prose felt much slower than I remembered, and the prejudices were harder to overlook. I could not recreate the experience of reading it when I was young.

But I could recognize the pattern it left behind.

As I remember it now, Under the Tonto Rim follows a capable young woman who enters an unfamiliar mountain community. She brings practical knowledge about housekeeping, health, and the science of her time. The people around her have little formal education and live with beliefs she considers superstitious.

The family’s older son is a quiet, sturdy outdoorsman building his own log cabin. Naturally, she falls in love with him.

Only recently have I understood why that story held me so strongly: it helped shape my idea of the best kind of story.

Competence without too much chaos.
A place worth helping.
A new home.
A quiet romance with someone sturdy enough to build his own cabin.

After finding that feeling once, I searched the rest of the closet shelves for it. Some books were historical romances, some were contemporary romances, and others occupied that particular paperback territory where gothic houses, family secrets, dangerous men, and women in impractical clothing all met.

A few gave me what I was looking for. Most did not.

I knew stories could offer something I wanted, but I did not yet know how to find the right ones. Once I had exhausted the books I liked in the closet, I needed somewhere else to look.

I knew libraries existed. My father had gotten library cards for my sisters and me when we were younger. But I do not remember thinking of libraries at that age as places where I could reliably keep finding books for myself.

Middle school began to change that.

The school library made books accessible in a new way, even if its selection was limited. Later came the public library and, eventually, taking the bus there myself. What had begun as one accidental collection in a closet opened into rows of possibility.

Books stopped being objects that happened to fall into my life. They became something I could seek.

The Private Worlds Books Gave Me

From my preteen years well into adulthood, I preferred reading to almost anything else. Until the last few years, romance was my primary genre. I might read historical fiction, fantasy, or another kind of story, but for a long time I had one firm requirement:

There had to be a romance.

Books felt like private worlds to me. Other people could see the cover, but they could not enter the experience unless they read the book too. As a natural homebody, reading offered a safe way to travel, fall in love, face danger, make mistakes, and live beyond the boundaries of ordinary life.

The experience could be put away.

Then opened again when needed.

During more religious periods of my life, I looked back on those romances as corrupting. Later, once I stepped beyond some of that restriction, I remembered their discovery more fondly—though not uncritically.

The romances had helped shape what I imagined love should look like: protective men, capable leaders, complete devotion, and tenderness reserved for one chosen woman. Real life proved more complicated and less neatly shaped. I eventually learned that something real could be meaningful without resembling the fantasy I had absorbed for years.

That did not end my enjoyment of romance. I still love a good romance woven into a larger story. I can lose myself in it without treating it as a template for my own life.

The books contained ideas I outgrew and expectations I had to examine.

They also gave me worlds I remain grateful to have inhabited and helped make reading one of the central pleasures of my life.

Both things can be true.

How a Book Travels

I now find myself wondering about the women who owned those paperbacks before me.

It is difficult to imagine the church women I knew openly carrying some of those covers into a donation room. But perhaps that says more about what women were expected to show one another than about what they actually read at home.

Maybe the books belonged to quiet rebels—or to women who lived conventional church lives, read whatever they pleased, and did not believe a dramatic paperback required a public confession.

Maybe someone was simply clearing out an older relative’s house and never looked closely at the covers.

But before they were mine, they had already lived other lives. Someone bought them, read them, and folded down the corners. They may have rested beside beds, traveled in purses, waited on kitchen tables, or remained untouched for years on a shelf.

Then someone decided they were no longer worth keeping.

They entered a system once intended to carry useful things toward people living far from home. They reached my grandmother in New Mexico, traveled with her to Texas under cover of old clothes, were stored by my mother, forgotten by the adults, and discovered by a girl trying to turn a closet into a study.

The books had been cast off.
They had not finished traveling.

For many years, my own reading life became much less physical. Once ebooks became widely available, I stopped owning many print books. I dislike clutter, and carrying an entire library everywhere felt miraculous. I never had to be without something to read.

Recently, though, I have started borrowing physical books from my small-town library again. I had forgotten the pleasures of paper: the smell, the rhythm of turning a page, the temporary responsibility of a borrowed book, and the collection of bookmarks that appears once you decide not to fold down a corner.

It makes me wonder where a girl today might accidentally discover the books that change the shape of her life.

Perhaps in a thrift store. A library sale. A Little Free Library. An old e-reader no one remembered to clear. Or maybe somewhere there is still a forgotten box at the back of a closet, waiting for a curious child who has decided that older girls require private workspaces and organized shelves.

Stories seem to have their own stubborn way of finding readers.

One part of this particular journey remains unknowable. My very proper missionary grandmother loved daytime soap operas, which leaves me with one final question:

Did she truly never open those books before she brought them to Texas?

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Featured image: Fictional cover artwork inspired by vintage historical romance paperbacks.