A hometown can recognize your face while needing time to recognize your life.

Returning somewhere you are known is a strange mixture of ease and friction. People recognise you at once, greet you by name, ask after your parents, and the whole apparatus of familiarity works perfectly. What has not travelled is everything that happened while you were away: the work, the losses, the person you became somewhere else. So you can be entirely known and largely unknown in the same conversation.

Give the place a little time rather than expecting to be met as you are now. And offer one or two real details about your present life, since people can only update a picture they are given.