“Where are y’all from?” a charming woman asked my husband, Carl, and me as we approached her counter at the Mount Airy Visitors Center.
When we responded “California,” she enthusiastically commented, “Welcome! We have so many visitors from all over!”
We had driven here to this small, friendly town of some 10,600 in the foothills of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains that is about an hour from my cousins’ homes in Wilkes County. I had visited my Southern relatives many times since childhood, but this was my first visit to Mount Airy, the hometown of actor Andy Griffith and an inspiration for small-town Mayberry in the popular 1960s television series “The Andy Griffith Show.”…