Who's Who-sday | At 80, Kay Anderson keeps moving, giving back at Apple Blossom Festival

260428-whos-kay-01.JPG

Kay Anderson stands for a portrait in her backyard at her home in East Wenatchee Tuesday, April 21, 2026.

Kay Anderson does not sit still. Not at 80 - "You can say I'm going to be 80 years old on Saturday," she says, with a shrug that hints at her birthday on April 25 - and not in a town that, in her telling, hums with the quiet insistence that everyone ought to be doing something.

At the Washington State Apple Blossom Festival Arts and Crafts Fair, where vendor tents bloom like temporary gardens and the air smells faintly of kettle corn and varnish, Anderson is everywhere at once. She is a booth sitter, a title that feels almost insufficient. She is a stand-in, a promoter, a conversationalist, a quiet steward of other people's work.

"I'm not just sitting there being a dumb person in a chair," she says. "I'm there to entice people to come back."

She makes her rounds deliberately and attentively, always more than once. She learns where the artists have come from, how long they've been returning, what their hands have made and why. As a booth sitter, she cannot conduct business on behalf of the vendor, but, as she put it, "I prefer not to be responsible for other people's money," she says. However, she collects their stories freely.

And if someone needs a break, she appears.

"You never know what you need," she says. "Sometimes people just need personal time."

The fair itself is a family affair, stitched together across generations. Her daughter, Kelly Atwood, is the festival's arts and crafts chair and runs the event with a kind of theatrical stamina, earned, perhaps, from decades in the Wenatchee Valley's music and theater scene, where she has directed, acted, costumed and produced for more than 30 years - including this year's festival show, "Legally Blonde: The Musical."

"I'm absolutely amazed by Kelly's involvement," Anderson says. "The stamina she has."

Atwood has turned the Arts and Crafts Fair into something both logistical and lyrical - a place of entirely handmade arts and goods that is arranged, judged, fed and, briefly, beautifully held together. The whole family shows up: her mother, her children - a small, moving constellation who give their weekend over to the work.

For Anderson, that is the point.

"It was time I could spend with my grandkids," she says. "That's important."

Beginning on Friday, Anderson judges booths, though she confesses she is often the last to turn in her ballot, delayed by conversations she cannot quite bring herself to cut short. Saturday begins, as it always does, with the parade, and then Anderson slips into the rhythm of the park. On Sunday, she helps set out a brunch for vendors in Memorial Park.

"I really like to know about what people do and who they are," she says.

If the park is her stage in May, her yard is her cathedral the rest of the year. It spreads across just under half an acre, a kind of private garden she tends herself - no hired help, no shortcuts, just a long memory for soil and season. She has been gardening since childhood; she describes herself, not entirely joking, as a "garden slave" to her parents. In Portland, people once came to pick roses from their yard for the Rose Festival parade.

The work never left her.

"It is in my blood," she says. "And it's keeping me young."

There is a discipline to it, but not a schedule. She walks the yard each day and lets it tell her what needs to be done. In spring, especially, the reward is immediate.

"Every day you walk around the yard, you see something new beginning," she says.

This year, the tomatoes are already blooming - "freaky," she calls it, delighted - and most of the garden has been in the ground for weeks. She plants, prunes and coaxes. She builds, too: sewing, woodworking, reupholstering, whatever the moment requires. "Use it or lose it," she says, a philosophy she applies to both hands and time.

Her calendar fills easily.

She sings with the Appleaires, rehearsing weekly and performing during the festival. She volunteers as an usher at the performing arts center. She gives blood - approaching her fourth gallon, a fact she recounts with mild surprise. She has recently begun volunteering with the Chelan-Douglas Community Action Council, helping distribute food to families.

"I think this is a very active community," she says of the Wenatchee Valley. "There are so many opportunities to volunteer that nobody should be sitting around."

That conviction feels less like judgment than an invitation. Anderson did not always know this place. It was, in many ways, introduced to her through family, through Atwood, through church, through the slow accumulation of small commitments that become, over time, a life.

"It's (volunteering) really been kind of a motivator to get out and about in the retirement years," she says. "And to give back something."

She also speaks of what it means to grow older here: the importance of transportation, of access, of the quiet infrastructure that allows people to remain visible in their own lives. She considers herself fortunate - healthy, mobile, surrounded by family - but does not mistake that for inevitability.

There are, in Anderson's story, the expected markers: a 43-year marriage to Dick Anderson, who died last September; a career that began as a nurse's aide and ended as a vice president in the insurance industry; a house built by hand in Onalaska and another in East Wenatchee, where the humorously named "East Wenatchee River" - an in-ground water feature Anderson built - runs and the seasons arrive on time, or sometimes early.

But what defines her now is not what she has done. It is how persistently she continues to do.

At the fair, she moves from booth to booth, talking, encouraging and learning. At home, she walks her garden, noticing what has changed since the day before. In the choir, she adds her voice to something larger than herself. In all of it, there is motion: purposeful, unshowy, constant.

"I'm a believer in use it or lose it," she says.

At 80, she has chosen, quite decisively, not to lose it.

Copyright 2026 Tribune Content Agency. All Rights Reserved.