I wasn’t offended. I glanced down at my reflection in the side window. I wore a simple, charcoal-gray coat I’d bought from a Salvation Army in Anchorage before boarding the plane. My boots were scuffed, the leather scarred by the Alaskan permafrost, having tread on ice far more often than the polite Georgia asphalt. That was twenty years in the North. Twenty years I had carved out of my own life, hollowing myself out so that my family here, in the soft, syrup-thick climate of the South, would want for nothing.