Home & Kitchen · 4 days ago · By Lacey Holcomb

“My Hands Won’t Let Me Paint the Stripes Anymore.” Why a 73-year-old Arkansas grandmother is selling her last hand-painted watermelon bowls at a special price

For 46 summers, Wilda Pruitt’s husband grew watermelons outside Hope, Arkansas. After he was gone, she made a bowl that looked like one of his melons, and her six grandchildren started emptying it before supper. Now the arthritis in her hands has made the decision for her: on November 30 she closes her pottery shed for good. Fewer than 200 bowls are left.

The packing shed still smells a little like melons. For forty-six summers, this is where Arlis Pruitt sorted, stacked and loaded the watermelons from forty acres of sandy Hempstead County ground, and where every grandchild in the family learned to thump a melon and listen for the hollow sound.

Arlis has been gone since February of 2024. The old melon crates are shelves now. And on them, in neat rows, sit small ceramic bowls painted like watermelon halves, each with a zigzag rim and six little colored balls perched on the points.

Wilda Pruitt picks one up and pulls the blue ball. A thin steel fork slides out of the rim. She spears a grape with it and hands it over.

“That’s Tucker’s,” she says. “Don’t tell him I let you use it.”

Forty-six summers of melons

Wilda is 73. She married Arlis in 1972, the year she turned nineteen, and in 1978 they put in their first melons on land his father had farmed cotton on. Hope is famous for growing the biggest watermelons in the country, and the Pruitts did their share: Crimson Sweets and Jubilees for the trucks to Little Rock and Dallas, and every year one long row of yellow-fleshed melons that never went on a truck at all.

“That row was for the grandkids,” Wilda says. “He called it the secret row. They’d sit on the tailgate with a salt shaker and eat yellow watermelon until their shirts were ruined.”

Wilda has been throwing pots for more than twenty years, first at a Tuesday-night class in town, then on a used wheel Arlis bought her for their thirtieth anniversary. Mugs, pie plates, the odd lamp base for a church raffle. Nothing she ever sold for more than gas money.

When Arlis got sick, the fields were leased out. After the funeral, she moved her wheel and her little kiln into the empty packing shed. “I couldn’t stand the quiet in the house,” she says. “Out here I could hear the trucks on the highway and pretend.”

That first summer without him, the grandchildren still came on Sundays. There are six of them, from Kenzie, who is 24, down to Tucker, who was six. Wilda did what she had always done: she cut up fruit, put it in a plastic tub and set it in the fridge.

“And there it sat,” she says. “They’d open the fridge, look right past it and grab a bag of chips. By Wednesday I was throwing out mushy cantaloupe. Every single week.”

It isn’t only her grandchildren. According to the CDC, only about one in eight American adults eats the recommended amount of fruit. Most of it, Wilda is convinced, isn’t being refused. It’s being forgotten behind the pickles.

A bowl that looked like Granddaddy’s melons

The idea came that December, while she was trimming pie plates for Christmas. “I thought, those kids never ignored a watermelon in their lives. Not once. What if the bowl looked like one of his?”

She threw a small, round bowl about the size of half a cantaloupe and, while the clay was still soft, cut the rim into a zigzag with the same paring knife Arlis used to cut melons at the kitchen sink. She painted the outside lime green with dark green stripes, the way a Crimson Sweet looks lying in the field, a thin white band along the edge for the rind, and the inside red with little black seeds.

Then she solved the other problem. “Nobody ever had a fork,” she says. “They’d eat with their fingers and drip on the couch, or go hunting in the drawer and get distracted.” So before the first firing she pushed a narrow hole down into each of the six points. After the glaze firing, a little stainless steel fruit pick with a colored ball on top slides into each one. Six points, six picks, six grandchildren. Each one got a color.

Christmas Day, 2024

She set the bowl on the kitchen counter on Christmas morning, filled it with grapes and clementines, and didn’t say a word.

Tucker found it first. He pulled the blue ball, saw the fork come out and hollered, “This one’s MINE.” Within a minute every grandchild had claimed a color. Kenzie took pink. The bowl was empty before the ham came out of the oven, and Wilda refilled it twice.

“Twenty years I begged them to eat fruit,” she says. “And a bowl did it in one afternoon. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be insulted.”

By spring, the bowl lived on the counter for good. Kenzie’s mother asked for one for her own kitchen. So did the pastor’s wife. Then a neighbor wanted one with a yellow inside, “like the secret row,” and Wilda made that, too.

What makes Wilda’s bowl work

There is no trick to it, and Wilda won’t pretend there is. “It’s a bowl,” she says. “It is not going to make anybody eat broccoli.”

What it does is three simple things. It gets the fruit out of the fridge and onto the counter or the table, where people actually see it. It looks like something you want to reach into. And it brings its own forks, stored right in the rim, so nobody has to go looking for one and nobody eats with sticky fingers.

Grown-ups like it for the same reason. At a potluck or a card party, everyone pulls a pick and keeps it, so there are no fingers in the grapes and no toothpicks all over the table. Wilda’s Sunday school class now uses two of them for cheese cubes and olives.

She is honest about the size, too. The bowl is about 6.9 inches across and 3.7 inches tall. “It’s a snack bowl, not a salad bowl,” she says. “A good bunch of grapes, or an apple and a couple of clementines cut up. Enough for the kids before supper. Then you fill it again.”

She is just as particular about the picks. She uses stainless steel ones with small two-prong tips, because cheap plastic picks snap and wooden ones go fuzzy. “They’re little forks with a point,” she adds. “Fine for big kids and grown-ups. I wouldn’t hand one to a toddler.”

A line at the Watermelon Festival

In August of 2025, Wilda took forty bowls to a folding table at the Hope Watermelon Festival, mostly because Kenzie dared her to. They were gone before lunch on Friday.

This past August she brought a hundred and sixty, and a woman from Shreveport bought nine at once for her grandchildren. “She said, ‘I am not having them fight over colors at my house,’” Wilda laughs. “I told her, ma’am, that’s half the fun.”

Visitors took the bowls home to Dallas, Little Rock and Memphis and wrote asking for more. For a while Wilda mailed boxes from the post office every Tuesday. There was no website. There was a spiral notebook and a lot of stamps. This fall Kenzie, who now handles the orders, finally put the bowls online.

The bowls come in two versions, both with the same green-striped rind and the same six picks: Crimson Red, painted like the Crimson Sweets Arlis trucked to Dallas, and Golden Yellow, for the secret row.

“The yellow ones always go first,” Wilda says. “People think I made them up. I tell them, honey, you just never got invited to the right farm.”

Why these are the last ones

Every bowl takes Wilda the better part of a week from start to finish: thrown on the wheel, trimmed, cut, pierced, dried, fired, painted stripe by stripe, glazed and fired again. Then each pick is fitted to its point by hand so it slides in snug and doesn’t rattle.

At 73, her hands have made the decision for her. Arthritis has been creeping into her knuckles for years, and this summer it reached her right hand, the one that holds the brush. “The long stripes are the problem,” she says. “By the third bowl my fingers swell up so badly I can’t close them around the brush. I sit there with ice on my hand and look at the bowls I haven’t painted yet.”

Her doctor told her what she already knew: rest the hand or lose it. So this fall’s firing is her last. On November 30 she is closing the shed, and Kenzie will keep shipping what’s left of the final batch until it runs out. Right now that is 187 bowls.

For the last batch she has set one price: $49 a bowl with all six picks, instead of the $89 she charged at the festival. “I didn’t make these to get rich,” she says. “I made them so kids would eat a grape. I want them on kitchen counters by Thanksgiving and under the tree by Christmas. Half the people at the festival bought them for their grandbabies anyway.”

The shed closes on November 30. After that, what’s left of the last batch ships until it’s gone, and there won’t be another one.

What families are saying

Where to get one of Wilda’s bowls

The bowls are only sold through Wilda’s own small shop, which Kenzie runs from her kitchen table in Texarkana. No store carries them, and there won’t be another batch like this one.

“After the thirtieth, I’m done,” Wilda says. “If there are a few left at Christmas, Kenzie will keep mailing them. But I’m not making more.”

Payment and shipping: The shop takes all major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Every bowl is wrapped by hand with its six picks in place and ships within 1 to 2 business days. Every order comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee.

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