March of 2020 was a tough time for Reba McEntire. The Grand Ole Opry member was forced to postpone her Arena Tour, because of the pandemic, while also grieving the loss of her mother, Jacqueline, who passed away on March 14. McEntire remained in Oklahoma to help her sister Susie clean out her parents’ things in their home,
The singer had just become reacquainted with Rex Linn earlier that year, but even their new romance didn’t deter him from helping however he could, which in McEntire’s case, meant providing her family with food — and a lot of it.
“Every day there was a new something coming in,” McEntire recalls on The Jennifer Hudson Show. “We live in southeastern Oklahoma, Susie does… and it takes you a long time to get anywhere. So, here comes UPS or Federal Express, and Mark Eaton, my brother-in-law, was standing out on the front porch and said, ‘What’s he gonna bring today? What’s he sending?'”
Linn wasn’t just providing meals for the family from afar, but over-the-top food, from all over the country.
“He sent pecan pie, lobster tail, steaks — Perini steaks from south Texas — and boy, it was a good time. McConnell’s ice cream. My little sister would ration us. We’d just get one little scoop per night while we were watching Ozark. She was saving it.”
McEntire and Linn weren’t able to be together much at first, because of the pandemic. But it was while they were apart that McEntire believes their relationship grew even stronger.
“Mainly during COVID, we were talking every day. We would have ‘coffee camp’ in the morning,” McEntire tells CMT’s Cody Alan. “Every morning, that’s the first thing I did when I woke up. I would call him. We would have coffee camp together for about two hours, and he was the last person that I would talk to when I went to sleep that night.
“So that built an intimate relationship that was totally talking and visiting, and when we finally got together in June, it was like we knew each other so well that it just worked,” she adds.
McEntire is currently on the final leg of her Reba: Live in Concert Arena Tour, with Terri Clark and The Isaacs serving as her special guests. Find music and tour dates at Reba.com.