Duffie Taylor | The Roanoke Times

Linda Greene accepts the state lottery's prize for its "Win for Life" game Tuesday morning. Her ticket for the March 7 drawing was purchased at a Stop In Food Stores in Roanoke.

Several weeks ago Linda Greene received an inexpensive gift from her husband -- a $1 "Win for Life" ticket bought from Stop In Food Stores on Memorial Avenue in Roanoke.

Tuesday morning she received another gift -- this one not so cheap and straight from the hands of Virginia Lottery officials.

Greene, the March 7 Win for Life top ticket winner, accepted her $1,000-a-week-for-life prize at the store where her husband purchased it a few weeks ago.

Up until a week ago today, Greene had no idea that the ticket her husband gave her was a top prize winner. Neither did her husband.

Her husband, Michael Greene, said he was scanning the pages of The Roanoke Times on March 11 when he came across an article about an unclaimed lottery ticket. He immediately grabbed his wife's ticket on top of their dresser and compared the numbers to those in the paper. They matched.

"I was in disbelief," he said.

When he called his wife at work to tell her they were winners, she, too, was dumbfounded by the news.

"It always happens to someone else," Linda Greene said Tuesday morning when she officially accepted her prize. "We're fortunate that it happened to us."

Michael Greene said he had bought lottery tickets from the store since the Win for Life game -- which requires the top winner to choose six numbers correctly -- started three years ago.

"I had been buying these tickets off and on because I knew if I won, it would take care of her for the rest of her life," he said.

Linda Greene was one of 335,185 people who participated in the March 7 Win for Life drawing. Her odds of winning the top prize were 1 in 5.2 million, according to the Win for Life Web site.

She is one of 26 people to win the prize in Virginia since the Win For Life game began, lottery officials said. She is the only winner to come from Roanoke.

Despite her good luck, the top winner said she has no plans for a spending spree.

"We're not big spenders," she said.

Greene, executive secretary at Roanoke United Methodist Home, said she did not plan to quit her job and that life would continue pretty much as usual.

She added that she would give more money to her church, West End United Methodist, and make some repairs on her home in the Grandin Court area.

Stop In Food Stores also received a $10,000 bonus check for selling the winning ticket. The money will go to the store's headquarters, Petroleum Marketers Inc. in Roanoke.

Win for Life is a multistate lottery game that Virginia shares with Georgia and Kentucky.