The Light on Lackey Road

She doesn’t just walk down Lackey Road.

She moves to it.

One moment, her stride is steady. The next, her feet catch a rhythm only she can hear. An arm swings. Her shoulders begin to bounce with the beat, her reflective green vest bobbing with it. Before long, she’s full-on dancing, completely absorbed in the music playing through the single earbud tucked beneath the wide brim of her white sun hat.

She isn’t performing for anyone. It’s all for her. Just some carefree steps, almost as if the road belongs to her and the contemporary Christian music she’s listening to is too good to stand still.

As a Honda Odyssey comes around the bend near the Davidson Homestead property, without looking and without hesitation, her hand comes up — one steady, practiced wave. The driver answers with a wave of his own before heading south past the apple orchard, down the straight stretch of Lackey.

For a few seconds, two strangers acknowledge each other before continuing with their day.

“I think kindness is very underrated,” she said. “We all need to be whatever light we can be.”

If you’ve driven Lackey Road often enough in the morning, you’ve probably seen her. Maybe you’ve waved back. Maybe you’ve caught yourself smiling at her grooving out.

For years, she’s been one of those people drivers recognize, but few actually know.

Charlotte Keys understands. From behind a windshield, it only takes a few seconds to notice a 68-year-old woman dancing on the shoulder of one of the KP’s busiest roads.

The reasons behind it take a little longer.

Keys retired in September 2025 after a 40-year career as a medical imaging technologist, spending decades with people facing some of the most uncertain moments of their lives.

“Everybody’s worried,” she said. “They’re worried about what’s happening. They’re wondering, ‘Is this going to change my life?’ ”

Every day, she met people carrying fear, and day after day, she carried those conversations home.

Even while she was still working, she had to make room to shake it off. During her last year on the job, she worked three long shifts, then had four days off.

“I used to joke with people that I just pretended to be retired on those four days,” she said. Walking was how she handled the weight of a job where almost everyone she met was afraid.

Walking clears her mind. Nature slows her down. Christian music lifts her spirits. And dancing is the sum of it all.

Keys doesn’t pretend she has life figured out. But she knows what helps.

Keys grew up in Manson, where her family grew apples near Lake Chelan. Her medical imaging career later took her coast to coast, from hospitals in Washington, D.C., to San Diego, and throughout the western United States, training CT technologists for General Electric. She raised her kids in Newport, on the Oregon coast, and when they left for college, she moved back to Washington to be closer to her mother.

She settled in Gig Harbor in 2014, where her sister lived, and there she met her future husband, Steve. They married in 2020 and bought a place on the Key Peninsula, where woods surround their home on three sides, birds crowd the trees, and bears have torn down the bird feeder so often that they finally stopped putting it back up.

“To get out of that environment and be in the woods, with room to think freely, really saved me from getting so burned out that I couldn’t do my job anymore,” she said. “I saw too many people — people much younger than me — who just stopped. They stopped walking. They stopped taking care of themselves. They just … stopped.”

Now retired, whether it’s Aqua Fit at the YMCA, tai chi at The Mustard Seed, or her walks down Lackey, Keys is determined to keep moving.

Her mornings often begin after the school buses finish their routes. She heads out for 90 minutes wearing one Bluetooth earbud, leaving the other ear open for traffic. The dancing comes when it comes; it’s not planned, and she’s unbothered by who’s watching.

“I really stopped caring what people think about it a long time ago,” she said.

Keys learned to spend less time worrying about things that don’t matter on her walks and more time paying attention to the things that do.

She notices butterflies and hopes they’ll land long enough for her to identify them. She stops to photograph mushrooms. She watches deer in the meadows and finds cougar tracks in the mud. She thinks about how she’ll be a grandmother for the first time later this year. She thinks, too, about her father, who died at 68 — the same age she turned this summer — and her mother, who lived to 94. She doesn’t know which number her life will follow. She just knows she doesn’t plan to waste a single morning finding out.

“I need my health. I need my attitude,” she said. “I need to stay as upbeat as I can for as long as I can.”

If you see her dancing on Lackey Road, wave, she said, and honk if you want. It may startle her, but she said she’ll laugh it off and catch the beat again.

“It’s a reminder to smile,” Keys said. “I love seeing people wave back. It reminds me that’s what we’re supposed to do — be kind.”

Even if it’s only for a moment, before she moves on down the road.

“I plan, for the rest of my days, to keep moving.”