Listen as the pages of the magazine come to life in the Storytellers podcast showcasing the voices of Our State writers. Each podcast episode features a writer reading their column aloud, allowing each distinct voice to shine. Click below to listen to Editor in Chief Elizabeth Hudson read her column aloud. 

“Let’s take a drive,” I said to my mother, and off we went, winding out of Greensboro and past Winston-Salem to pick up that long stretch of U.S. Highway 52 toward Mount Airy.

I didn’t tell her where we were going; I’d planned the day as a surprise — first, lunch at the Dairy Center, then to Wally’s Service Station for a Mayberry Squad Car Tour. But when the knob at Pilot Mountain State Park came into view, she leaned forward, eyes bright, and asked, “Are we going to Mount Pilot?”

She caught herself, and we both laughed — Mount Pilot isn’t a real place, of course, except in the way television made it so, fixed forever into the geography of North Carolina by The Andy Griffith Show, which, thanks to syndication, has never been off the air since its debut in 1960.

My mother was 10 then. She watched Perry Mason and Gunsmoke, but those places — the courtrooms of Los Angeles and the plains of Dodge City — were far from her corner of southeastern Guilford County. Then came a show that looked as if it could’ve been filmed down the road. It looked just like home.

After our lunch, Mike Cockerham was waiting at Wally’s, leaning against the fender of one of his 1960s Ford Galaxies as if time itself had slowed just for us. He swung open the back door, hinge creaking, and as my mother eased onto the bench seat, I saw the years fall away.

She told a story of her first car, a 1953 Mercury her father bought for $100. Straight gear. He taught her to work the clutch on a dirt road in his ’37 Dodge truck. She stalled it again and again, until the day she didn’t. After that, she went everywhere in that Mercury — ball games on Friday nights, beach trips with the windows down. Thirty cents bought a gallon of gas; a dollar took her anywhere.

Later, after saving her waitress tips, she bought a used Ford Falcon for $500, and that was the car she had when she met my dad.

He loved cars, too, and showed up for their first date in a 1968 Buick Skylark. Powder-blue. They drove country roads with no traffic; went to dinner at Cellar Anton’s in Greensboro; and one afternoon, without ceremony, they drove that car to the courthouse and got married.

I never knew the Skylark; in the ’70s, during the gas crunch, they traded it for a VW Beetle. In the ’80s, came my dad’s red pickup — nearly 300,000 miles on it before he finally let it go — and my mother’s Chrysler sedan, the car in which I took my driving test. Years later, they bought matching Subarus, hers in Satin White and his in Sandstone, two cars parked side by side in the driveway, and they stayed like that for a long time.

Last Christmas, on a cold winter night, my mom and I rode together in the Asheboro Christmas Parade. I was the Grand Marshal, technically, but she was the one people recognized, she and my dad having built a life in this town. The temperature dropped to 29 degrees. We huddled together in a ’58 Chevy Corvette convertible — powder-blue, how about that? — and waved to the lines of people up and down Sunset Avenue and Fayetteville Street. Lights flickered off the chrome. And as we inched along the block where her store once stood, down the streets where my dad hauled lumber for the sign and where they ate sandwiches together on slow days, time replayed itself, old stories rolling forward and backward, her memories, and mine, running on repeat.

Elizabeth Hudson
Editor in Chief