Some people, like my college professor whose English accent remained crisp even after decades in America, do not shift on the outside. I do not have the strength, or perhaps the rigidity, to display always the same persona. When I visit relatives in Georgia and North Carolina, my voice begins to drawl; my casual “Hey, mom” elongates into “Hello, mother.” For two years, when my family lived in London, I had the voice of a middle-class English girl who ate sweeties and went on holiday. And for more than a dozen years, I lived in Seattle. I absorbed the distant friendliness of my Emerald City neighbors and mimicked it perfectly even while recognizing its chilliness. I even missed it when I lived elsewhere, in cities in the Northeast or California, where the cool politeness of the Northwest seemed like a balm compared to the astringent, demanding squawks of people wedged into more crowded lives. But then I moved to Oregon.

On one of my first days living in Portland, I walked into an enormous Fred Meyer and began wandering the aisles. A clerk looked up from the shelves at me and broke into a toothy grin. “Hey, how are ya?” she asked, her voice full of the genuine enthusiasm of seeing an unexpected friend. I stopped, startled. “Fine, thanks. And you?” I answered. She was not, as I had momentarily thought, somebody I knew; she was simply an employee doing her job, greeting customers. But she was the most sincerely cheerful clerk I’d ever encountered. I smiled back, stepped past her boxes of inventory and slunk around a corner.

Within a few weeks, I realized that she had not been preternaturally happy; every time I went into a store or public library, total strangers seemed delighted to see me. Even the socially maladjusted, such as my next-door neighbor, liked this idea of verbal exchange; when I walked past her one morning with just a nod and a smile, she yelled at my retreating back, “Hey, what’s your problem? Can’t you even say hi?”

More than half a million people live in Seattle; about the same number inhabit Portland. But nearly six million people reside in Washington, while Oregon can only lay claim to about three and a half million. Even in Portland, Oregon felt smaller, quieter, cozier. People talked about being Oregonians. I guess I used to be a Washingtonian. But nobody I knew ever spoke of being such; I was a Seattleite first, and “from Washington” if pressed.

The year we moved to Oregon, my boyfriend and I went to see his family in Boston for Christmas. We had to do some last-minute shopping and joined several dozen other people in a tiny store full of pop-up birthday cards and wind-up plastic sushi. At the cash register, the woman ahead of me got out a vividly colored twenty-dollar bill and spread it flat on the counter, framing it with her hands. Like a magpie, I eyed it admiringly. “Is that one of those new twenties?” I asked. “They’re so pretty.”

The woman turned her head and looked at me, expressionless, before turning away. She hadn’t taken out her cash to enjoy its charm; she’d wanted to show that she was in a hurry:  Her money was ready, come on, let’s move! She paid and she left. I should have felt chastised. Instead I was amused. What’s the hurry? I wanted to call after her. We could have had a nice chat.

This year, a few days after I met the taxi driver, my boyfriend and I went walking in downtown Seattle. It was dusk, the western sky still a bright turquoise below the first stars. We had eaten an early dinner and were walking, arm in arm, south along Second Avenue, below the symphony hall and above the art museum. He had just told a joke, and I was laughing; on the corner, an old woman, swaddled in a heavy purple parka, held out her hand to us, asking for spare change. Up the street a group of people walked toward us. I was looking at my boyfriend and the sky and the woman and ahead; the group, I realized, was a family. And it was a family I knew, the family of a friend I had long lost touch with. We had had a falling-out several years ago. Now here she was, her arm tucked into her older sister’s, walking toward me. I looked, and I looked away.

Did she see me? I don’t know. If I had stopped, and said hello, we might have had a conversation. One of those reticent Seattle conversations like baked Alaska, warm on the surface, frozen on the inside. It was much easier to be the happy couple, walking obliviously by, unembarrassed, unconcerned. Better, maybe. But hey, then, what’s my problem? Can’t I even say hi?

CAROLINE CUMMINS, a 2005 graduate of the University of Oregon’s literary nonfiction program, regularly stops strangers in the street to chat.  This essay was a winner in the 2005 Oregon Quarterly Essay contest.