Today, the wonderful Reba McEntire is 69 years old and she truly deserves all the praise she can get. Personally, it feels like she has been around all my life and I still listen to her, several times a week. But everything hasn’t been milk and honey in Reba’s life. Born to ride and work the land Reba McEntire wasn’t just born country — she lived it. The legendary country queen was born in McAlester, Oklahoma, in 1955. But she grew up on her family’s massive 8,000-acre ranch in tiny Chockie, Atoka County. Reba’s childhood was all about hard work, determination, and western traditions. Life on the ranch didn’t allow for much downtime, and even as a little girl, Reba was expected to pull her weight. By the time she was just five years old, Reba was already driving her dad’s truck through fields of cattle. Well, steering might be the better word since she was too small to reach the pedals. Her dad, Clark McEntire, would prop her up with a 50-pound feed sack, shift the truck into ”gr...
My Husband's Other Woman Came to My Door and Said, 'I'm Pregnant with His Baby, and We Needed This House to Raise Our Family'
The perfume on my husband's shirt was only the beginning. Then a pregnant stranger knocked on my door and calmly asked me to hand over my home. I let her keep talking for a reason. My husband's shirt smelled like a woman who wasn't me. I stood in the laundry room with Tyler's collar lifted halfway to my face, and the perfume on it was sharp and floral and entirely unfamiliar. I lowered the shirt into the basket, the way you lower something you don't want to wake. The house was quiet around me. My husband's shirt smelled like a woman. Eighteen years of mornings in that kitchen, the same wooden table where our two kids had once eaten cereal before school. The same hum from the refrigerator. Our kids were in college now. The quiet had become a presence of its own. Tyler had left before sunrise again. He left earlier and earlier in the morning, later and later at night. "It's just a busy quarter," he'd told me the night before, kicking off his sh...