Karen Kennedy Yearsley Born in 1938 in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, Karen Ann Kennedy grew up in the town of Stony Point on the granite cliffs of the Palisades, thirty miles up the Hudson from New York City. Her father’s people had come from Ireland and had lived along the river for three generations. Of German stock, her mother hailed from Buffalo. A brilliant storyteller, Karen often told tales of what she called an “idyllic” childhood—of lemonade stands and selling wildflowers door-to-door, of stolen cigarettes and Sunday afternoon piano recitals gone badly wrong. There were also darker vignettes, like the one about being saved from a sexual assault in the town’s Presbyterian cemetery by her lifelong friend Claire, who called from Stony Point and spoke with Karen a few days before her peaceful death in Seattle on Tuesday, February 4th. Karen’s father had staunch plans for his only daughter to go to Cornell University to study home economics and, more important, find a husband. Against these stiff paternal headwinds Karen navigated her way to Colby College in Waterville, Maine where she majored in English Literature. Her love of books sustained her throughout her life. She picked up the home economics through self-led on-the-job training after her marriage to John Yearsley in Stony Point in 1961. Ten years and four kids later, she was milling wheat into flour and baking her own sourdough, while sourcing many other organic foodstuffs through a local co-op that she helped to found. She used these ingredients in the lavish, relentlessly healthy breakfasts and bag lunches that she prepared for her kids. Before sending this contentious brood out the doortowards the school bus in the morning, she gave each child a big spoonful of cod liver oil. She sewed, patched, recycled, and sang, and was an almost always successful household plumber. Her husband,John Yearsley, was from the SkagitValley and the couple returned to Washington State, moving to Bainbridge Island in 1971. With four kids underfoot or being driven by her to ballet class, piano lessons, and sports, Karen embarked on an ambitious building project, acting as general contractor for a house in Eagledale designed by the young Bainbridge architect Johnpaul Jones. It was one of Jones’s most important early commissions; he would go on to become the first American architect to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. Through her resourcefulness, vision, and warmth, Karen overcame all hurdles, from the merely unexpected to the nearly disastrous, and the contemporary angles of the three-story structure rose above the meadows and against the Douglas Firs of the forest beyond. She also oversaw the planting of the property’s Japanese-style gardens laid out by the celebrated Bainbridge landscaper Tad Sakuma. Karen nurtured theflowerbeds overthenextfourdecades.Throughout herlife, Karen took great care in preserving the things she made and loved. She attributed her cleanliness and orderliness to her “German gene,” and considered her wit, which only rarely sparked into anger, to be “Irish.” When she sold the house on Old Creosote Hill Road in 2011, she left it in pristine, museum-quality condition. As soon as her kids were old enough to drive, she enrolled in Olympic College and earned a nursing degree. She worked at the Messenger House eldercare facility for several years before taking up a position at Town & Country Market as a bookkeeper. Her lively humor complemented her love of games: she joined the Mountaineers in the 1960s and was a member of the Bainbridge Park District tennis group into her 80s; she was a vigorous hiker, an unsurpassed agate collector, a prolific potter, a sentimental watercolorist, and a patient birdwatcher with a particular affection for the avian life of Port Blakely. After the sale of her house in Eagledale, she spent her last fifteen years living in Winslow. Throughout her more than half-century on Bainbridge, she was a continual presence at the Senior Center where she volunteered in its thrift store, played table tennis, did line dancing, and was a pillar of the vigorous bridge scene. She donated her large collection of antique bottles excavated at Port Blakely to the Bainbridge History Museum. Even the congenital hearing-loss that afflicted her in herlate years did not dampen her vibrant sociability. During Covid she played on-line bridge several times a week with three of her four children and wrote a 70,000-word memoir rich in anecdote and selfironizing asides. From her unmistakable voice and free-wheeling style emerges an entertaining and disarmingly honest account of girl- and womanhood in the Atomic Age. Wit and grit carried her through. She separated from her husband in 2008, but he was at her bedside for an afternoon in the last week of her life for several hours of reminiscences. For Karen, play was not just a form of leisure, but her animating force, her way of being with herfamily and friends of all ages. She taught many games to herfour children and then to her dozen grandchildren, all of whom survive her. Whenever a joke is told, difficulties met with a laugh, a goofy hat put on, cards dealt, dice thrown, lettered cubes formed into words, stories told, or the ratcheting call of the kingfisher heard by her many descendants, Karen is with them, in them.