That’s Munchkin, Renee says as she opens the door. Munchkin, a 2-year-old, long-haired Chihuahua, is just one of eight family pets.

There’s Bobby Jo and Billy Boy and Baby, she says a little later, pointing to three goats through the sliding screen door in the large family room. When she and her husband decided to fence in a little more than half of their six acres, Renee says they brought in Bobby Jo and Billy Boy to keep the grass trimmed.

And Bobby Jo and Billy Boy brought in Baby, so to speak.

“We’re ‘Green Acres,’ ” she says.“I’m just very thankful Idon’t have to climb a telephone pole to make a call.”

The yellow lab running up and down the fence line barking is J.T., she says. Two of the three kittens, the solid black Ramba and gray striped Mischief, show up a few minutes later to slip inside the door Renee failed to shut all the way.

They’re not inside long before Renee scoops them up and carries them back out to join Pacey, the third kitten, who has gray stripes like Mischief.

It’s easy to see why they want in. The house is warm and inviting.

Family photos and mementos are displayed throughout the family room, which leads into a more formal music room on one side and an office, dining room and kitchen on the other.

Like the woman who lives in it, the main part of the house is open, with very few doors. Renee makes a living sharing the events of her life, from her early childhood days on Gheen Road in western Rowan County to the day her world crashed around her when her first husband took a shotgun to his head 13 years ago in Slidell, La.

On the computer at the desk in her office space, she is working on her third book, this one about depression in the Christian community. She was asked to co-author the book, titled “Holy Hush,” by evangelist Dr. Freddie Gage of Fort Worth, Texas.

Gage had heard her speak at the Southern Baptist Convention in Salt Lake City, Utah, about the depression preceding her husband’s suicide and then read about her struggle to survive without him in her first book, “Songs of the Night.”

On the wall beside her desk is a 4-H Alumni Award presented to her at the statewide 4-H Congress in Raleigh this past July. It was a press release from N.C. State University about the award that brought us here to interview this week’s Tuesday People.

It was through 4-H that Renee sang in her first talent competition. “I always wanted to sing,” she says. “It’s allI ever wanted to do.”

As a young child, Renee would stand in front of the television set and sing along with the commercial jingles. She also sang at Bethel Lutheran Church, where she attended throughout her childhood.

When she heard a 4-H club was forming in her neighborhood and that there would be a talent competition, Renee was eager to join. For her first competition in the Midway 4-H Club, she sang “Downtown,” by Petula Clark, her favorite pop singer at the time.

She won and went on to perform in the county competition, on stage and with a real microphone. “I was scared to death,” she says.

Her mother, Lorene Coates, was frightened for her. “She’d just break out in hives almost,” Renee says. “I’d tell her, ‘Mom, it’s OK. I can do this.’ ”

Renee won the county competition that year and went on to perform in district competition with the winners from the other age groups. She was a runner-up and missed out at the chance of going to the annual 4-H Congress in Raleigh.

“What happened, I got nervous,” she says. “The stage fright ruined me. That made me go home and be even more determined.”

The next year, Renee won the district competition and every year after that. As a district winner, she got to spend a week on the campus of N.C. State University at 4-H Congress and perform with the other winners from across the state.

Held in Reynolds Auditorium, she says it was a showcase of the best talent in the state. “That was just a thrill,” she says. “It became a yearly event.”

In the meantime, her parents gave her a piano for Christmas when she was in the seventh grade, and Renee began taking piano lessons from Mary Williams. She appeared in the Piedmont Players’ production of “Oliver” in the eighth grade and took voice lessons from Dr. Arthur Tennent at Catawba while in high school at West Rowan.

Her performances at 4-H Congress also led to television appearances on the Bob Gordon Show in Winston-Salem, the Arthur Smith Show in Charlotte and the Tommy Felts Show, also in Charlotte.

As a junior in high school, she won the Greater Greensboro Talent Contest and was asked to perform at bank Christmas parties and other local functions.

Renee, who earned a degree in music from Florida Bible College in Hollywood, Fla., and a master’s in music with specialization in vocal performance at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, started her own music ministry three years after her husband’s death and has been singing and speaking ever since.

She has recorded a cassette tape and CD of her songs, titled “Safe in His Arms” and “All for the Good,” respectively, and last year, published her second book, “You Know You’re Getting Old When...”

“It’s a humorous look at the aging process,” she says.

In July of this year, Renee received a phone call informing her that she had been nominated for the 4-H Alumni Award and at the subsequent 4-H Congress, she was one of two in the state to receive the honor.

The character traits she developed in 4-H have helped her throughout her life, she says. The 4-H program also provided her with a platform to develop her skills in front of a group of people.

“It taught me to overcome the nervousness,” she says, “and instead of concentrating on myself, to concentrate on the audience and what I’m trying to say to them rather than what they’re thinking of me.”

Renee has used her performance skills singing and speaking across the country at national Christian conferences, seminars and programs and in front of such large congregations as the First Baptist Church of Atlanta, where the Rev. Charles Stanley is minister, and at the Second Baptist Church of Houston, which has a membership of 22,000.

She has also had her own cable television show since May, “Hearts of Hope.”

“You know, I’m prime time,” she jokes. Her show is telecast on Monday nights at 11:30 on Action 64.

When she was first approached about doing it, Renee says she thought, “Who watches at 11:30 on Mondays? All normal people are asleep because they’ve got to get up and go to work the next day.”

What she has found is that many people do watch her show, on which she addresses ways to deal with life, “Real World Living,” she calls it.

“People say, ‘I saw you on TV,’ ” she says. “I say, ‘You pray for me. I’m trying to get better.’”

The best part about the way she makes a living, Renee says, is it has allowed her to take care of her children. Working out of her home makes it easy for her to take her two daughters to school and pick them up, and she’s free to do things with them in the evenings.

“My No. 1 job is still being Mom,” she says.

Her daughter, Nicole, who turned 3 the day after her father’s suicide, is now 16, and Tara, who was just four months old, is 13.

Nicole is captain of the varsity volleyball team at the private school they attend in Concord, and Tara is captain of the junior varsity team.

“I’m the biggest cheerleader,” Renee says. “I don’t know if these girls are keeping me young or making me old.”

Though her speaking engagements oftentimes take her out of town on weekends, Renee says her children and her second husband, Mel Melton, have their regular routines, including Sundays with her parents. “So Iknow when I’m not here,” she says, “they’re well taken care of at Mamaw’s.”

Her older sister, Cheryl, is a flight attendant for U.S. Airways and also has to work on weekends, so her husband and 3-year-old also spend Sundays at her parents. “That’s the one day of the week that the three first cousins can get together,” she says.

Renee also has two stepchildren from her marriage to Mel, who she met through a church singles program in Slidell and married five years later.

A native of Fayetteville, he was a career Navy man and wanted to retire to North Carolina. They married at Bethel Lutheran Church four years ago and bought their home in China Grove after that.

Mel’s daughter, Melanie, who is getting ready to go to college, lives with them, and his son, Jason, is a student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Renee says she loves being back in the county in which she grew up. Her parents built a house across from her maternal grandparents on Gheen Road, and she grew up with lots of aunts and uncles and cousins around her.

“It was a wonderful childhood,” she says. “I knew my parents loved me. I knew they were always going to be there for me.”

Renee says she was an only child for seven years before Cheryl, who now lives in Statesville, came along.

Growing up, Renee says she spent a lot of time with her mother’s father, Junius Thomason, who she called “Papaw.” He taught her to play tennis on the concrete slab in front of his door, and he always said to her,“Winners never quit; quitters never win.”

“That really is the bottom line with me,” she says, “that I just haven’t quit because of the grace of God, I would say, because there were times when I wanted to.”

People called her Papaw a “scrapper,” she says, because he kept everything and found a use for it. “My grandfather was into recycling before it was politically correct,” she says. “He was not doing it to save the earth. He was trying to save his family.”

He would cut his car off, she says, for example, a quarter of a mile from his house and coast in to save gas.He used old newspapers to pad the seat in his Dodge and carried around tubs of iron, copper and aluminum in his trunk.

Renee says she used to tell people she wanted to be a scrapper when she grew up, “just like my Papaw.”

“And I think Iam,” she says. “To this day,I’m ready to jump out of the car at the stop sign and grab the cans laying by the side of the road. That is money right there.”

Her background in scrapping helped, she says, when she became a widow at age 32 and had to provide for her two young daughters by herself. “A nice word to use is ‘frugal,’” she says. “My mom would probably say ‘tight.’ ”

These days, Renee and her family attend Blackwelder Park Baptist Church in Kannapolis, and her two daughters have participated in 4-H activities in Cabarrus and Rowan counties.

“I have been blessed,” she says. “God has been very good to us. We have a wonderful life, but it’s been a tough road to get there.”

Along the way, she says, there have been “lessons you learn in the dark of the night that you don’t learn in the brightness of the day.”