Jo Anna "Pee-Wee" Holt Watson is a charmer of a writer, her voice so vivid the reader is transported to a vanished rural culture intimately seen: mid-twentieth century, Woodford County, Kentucky. In A Taste of the Sweet Apple, Holt Watson documents one summer, her seventh, at Grassy Springs Farm in the heart of the Bluegrass. Here is a world of shadowy lanes, granddaddy's ice-cold artesian well, tobacco stripping rooms, a girl's pony barn, Ginnie Rae's Beauty Shoppe on the Main Street, and Ocean Frog's Grocery. Here, a grandfather clock in the hallway says did-not, did-not, and an oscillating "Anglican" fan plays Episcopal hymns.In this memoir where emphasis is on character essential to the ethics of community, a young girl of robust curiosity keeps company with the spells her people cast. At the center of the book is a poetic and telling bond, an adoring friendship between this small white girl and a black foreman, Joe Collins. There's a tempestuous physician father, a beautiful powerful mother in powerless times, and the "wonderfully long-winded" Aunt Tott. We witness the travail of hired laborers as well as the beauties of craft and devotion in Holt Watson's sharp rendering of traditional tobacco culture.
A seven-year-old girl may set her buckteeth on fire or bite her pony, but never misses the silent rush of spring water deep within the greenest land, a land from which she, too, springs. Brimming with unsentimental innocence and the sensuality of furs, tobacco, her mother's lemon lily beds, she draws a tough-minded portrait of girlhood. In the rural tradition, Holt Watson is a conjuror of tales both hilarious and moving, mixed with temper and spirit.
Jo Anna "Pee-Wee" Holt Watson was born and reared in Woodford County, Kentucky. An entrepreneur and recycling advocate, she was co-owner of BandanaYardbirds, a company that used scrap, overruns, and discontinued garden tool parts to produce whimsical birdlike yard sculptures. According to The Atlanta Constitution, "Pee-Wee travels around the country wearing a blue blazer and a straw hat preaching the gospel of recycling." Holt Watson is a fourth-generation Kentuckian and self-proclaimed Yellow Dog Democrat. She is an amateur photographer, gardener, avid sportsperson, former horse trials judge, and creator of Plumbline, a series of televised panel discussions regarding critical political and social issues. She was responsible for bringing together Jane Morton Norton and John Walsh to establish the Morton Center. Jo Anna Holt Watson lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with her Airedale, Harrie Holt, and Welsh Terrier, Maggie Tarbell.
