Clark and Marty were one of the first romantic couples I met in my bookworm years. This was my early middle school years and Janette Oke was a best-selling Christian romance author, maybe one of the first in that genre and all the older girls and the moms were reading her books. It was also one of the first books I read where people in the book constantly talked to God and prayers were written out in the dialogue and narrative and the main characters said evangelistic Christian things all the time. As I have said before, a good story does not need to have God-talk to be a gospel oriented story, and many "Christian" romances I have since read seem more like mediocre writing that is peppered with God talk so that it can sell in the religious market. But Janette Oke's Love Comes Softly is special to me, and I am sentimental about books I found magical in my grade school years. Some of those books I have read again as an adult and been distracted by certain themes or philosophical assumptions that I now would object to, but out of love and respect for that 5th grade bookworm Jessica, I choose not to be too harsh.
Marty is a pioneer woman who was heading west in a wagon train when her husband was killed. She was a relative newlywed and is expecting her first baby and now is quite alone in a strange land. The town where they buried her husband has a widower who has a young toddler he is struggling to care for, so she agrees to a marriage of convenience and the widower Clark vows to keep his physical distance and give her a private bedroom in exchange for her housekeeping and childcare help. And so most of this novel proceeds with Marty grieving her losses and being a clumsy housewife and using the slang of an unchurched greenhorn. And I guess most of the plot includes devout Christian Clark teaching her by example how to be a God-fearing pioneer. But I was more interested in the romance than the born-again believer part back then, and have to admit I still would be today.
They keep a polite distance all through the fall and winter and figure out how to work together as household partners and struggle through their own loneliness on their own. Until spring planting season comes. The "sexy" chapter that I read over and over, which is very tame indeed, but still so sexy, is the day when they are both planting in the garden and Marty is a lot less depressed and alienated from this community, and she is making progress through her grief and post-partum stages, and this is a day she is feeling a lot more spunky. The season of seed planting is a sexy time for farmers, I'm sure, and the sunny warm weather is helping Marty feel more happy and optimistic about her future. She plays a little prank on Clark and pours some seeds down his back and runs off. He chases her down and there is a tackle and a little wrestling in the dirt and the rest is history. I'm a sucker, I know, but I think this is one of the sexiest encounters between two people who have all of the sudden realized that they have been in love for a while. Clark plants some more seeds that night in their new shared bedroom and before long Marty is blooming with a pregnant belly.
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