Uncle Larry

Today we visited my Grandma and my Uncle Larry, who moved back here to live with her about ten years ago. He's quite the character. Every time we visit, we come back loaded down with various and assorted sundries. Today, it was an espresso machine, fancy artist set, two cowboy hats, two cowboy bandanas, five bottles of bubbles, three mini-bags of popcorn, six packs of cheese crackers w/peanut butter, one water-shooter duck, two tiny little maracas, a wrist blood pressure monitor, a computerized chess game, and two Pokemon videos. Everything is brand new and quite nice. He really loves my kids and Micki's kids, and he buys them all kinds of little things to give them every time we visit. Previous visits have yielded everything from a bag of straws and a bag of about a hundred wet-naps, to a kid-size tee-pee.

Uncle Larry likes to boast about having the only banana plantation in West Virginia. The local news even came out and shot footage for their weatherman to use. He's mom's brother, and everyone in her family has quite the green thumb. He has a lot of banana trees, as well as a small orchard of apple, pear, apricot and peach trees. He's also growing a couple of arbors of grapes and a multitude of other trees and shrubs, such as hazelnut and mulberry.

It's always an adventure when we go to visit my grandmother.