Gladys has longevity secret

She moves across the room with the grace of a ballet dancer, carefully opening a dark mahogany cabinet.

From pristine glass shelves Gladys lifts a small decorated egg. "I've made a thousand of these," she says proudly.

The colorful goose egg shell has a set of butterfly wings. Tiny blue clusters of glitter and plastic follow a colorful path along the cut-outs in the surface. It is a beauty, like its creator.

Meet Gladys Reynolds, Burien resident, self-taught artist in needlepoint, embroidery and eggshell art, who turned 104 in January of this year.

Gladys chuckles when visitors marvel at her pace of life-- how she moves like a woman half her age, does not have a family doctor and takes no pills.

"I hear that all the time," she smiles. For more than 30 years she has lived in Burien, teaching egg art and embroidery after retiring from secretarial work in Seattle.

Sitting quietly in an armchair is a beautiful Raggedy Ann doll, a favorite from the 1930s. It smiles back at us. "I've done 37 dolls," Gladys beams.

She was raised in Seattle, her home after her birth in Snohomish in January of 1906. Her dad was a harpist at the turn of the century. His family had settled in Nova Scotia in 1782. Her heritage is French/English.

She's a restless sort, never one to sit still if there is gardening to do. Outside her landscape is immaculate. Plants thrive like there is something in the water. She claims the only thing she can't do is mow the lawn.

Maybe it was the cool clean air of the Aleutian Islands where she lived for 12 years while her husband was in the military. Maybe it was the Seattle rain where they raised their own two kids.

Gladys has no explanation for her longevity. She never drank or smoked and going to church was not a requirement, but a pretty good idea.

There is variety in her work. She's decorated an ostrich egg and some hummingbird eggs. She never had a lesson. She just learned to do it.

When asked how she managed to get the hummingbird to give her an egg to decorate, she answered coyly, "I just talked that hummingbird into it."

She does not wear glasses except to read, drives her 1992 Lincoln whereever she wants and has never used a cane.

That secret to longevity. Maybe it is something in the water.