Before we moved to Boston, people warned me. Not in a mean way — in that well-meaning, I'm-just-being-honest way that people do when they think they're preparing you for something hard. Oh, you'll hate it. New Englanders are cold. They're rude. They don't let people in.

There is a particular feeling that comes with driving back into a city you used to live in. Not quite nostalgia, not quite homecoming. Something in between that does not have a clean word for it.