There is a very distinct feeling of the city in those first few days of Fall. There’s a smell in the air, like school supplies only much more potent. It’s in the way that those first few leaves fall from the boxed trees on the side of the street. It’s the way the little girl across from you on the subway swings her feat in anticipation, the way her dad in the gray suit checks his watch as he holds her pink Barbie backpack. This is New York to me: a combination of maple, school bags and public transportation. This is my hometown.

At 3 p.m. sharp, my dad would meet me in the school lobby at 112th street in between Riverside and Broadway. He would grab my bag and I would take his bike (the handlebars laughably high above my head). There was at a deli on 111th and Broadway called Samaad’s (most likely named after the owner). My dad would hand me two dollars and tell me to “go crazy.” Every day, I would get a lemon poppy seed muffin. These were no normal lemon poppy seed muffins (not that such a thing exists). These were warm like they had just come out of the oven. The lemony smell always left a stamp on the air and the butter from the top would leave marks on my jeans. I could never finish without getting the poppy seeds stuck in my teeth. I would spend the whole rest of the way home trying to pick them out.

The man at the register had a unibrow and a crooked-toothed smile that he always flashed just a little too wide so that you could tell it was a fake. Maintaining his cool was no small feet considering that every weekday around 3:15 p.m., Samaad’s was packed with children. There were only two aisles in the store separated by a giant coffee bar. Every spare inch would be taken up by backpacks and screaming. Kids would knock each other over to get to the last Odwalla juice or Lindt chocolate (my first encounter with the New York hostility most commonly seen on subway platforms). My dad would wait (with about fifteen other parents) patiently outside the store for me. When I came out, he would nod knowingly at my muffin. He would pull out his pocket knife and cut it carefully down the middle. Then, just to be fair, he would let me pick which half I wanted.

There was a small triangle of grass in between 106 and 107th streets that I liked to pretend was a real park. There were trees and the odd flower, but the focus of the triangle was a statue of a woman named Ida Strauss. Evidently, she refused to board her lifeboat on the Titanic when the crew wouldn’t let her husband on. I didn’t learn this until seventh grade. What I really cared about was how much fun it was to put my small feet in one of the pockets of her dress and hoist myself up to the top of her head. I would swing my legs around her neck and bend upside down. My dad would smirk and watch as he finished what I’d left of my muffin half. The best thing about the statue was that someone (I never found out who) would leave a few pennies in a fold of her dress. Every time we walked by, I would become maybe four cents richer, but to me the statue was a gold mine.

There was a video store on 105th in between Amsterdam and Broadway that never displayed the actual movie cases. Instead, they filled boxes stacked up to the ceiling with 3×5 note cards with only the titles printed on them. You would have to bring the title up to the desk. I remember when we first started going there that my head was too little to see the man behind the counter. It was magic. They were always playing a 80s comedy on some tiny TV near the doorway. While I would search through the musicals section, my dad would stand close to the screen and laugh uproariously. When I was a really young, I didn’t notice. Once I turned ten, I was embarrassed.

On 97th and Broadway, there was a homeless man who claimed to be a New York Times published poet. He would sit outside with a folding table and chair, and proudly display laminated (taped) copies of all the poems he’d written. Some were about his life, how he wound up homeless, others were about the city and how it feels to sleep on a step; the craziest ones were about Jesus. One time, for a school project, my friend and I took his photo. He told us about how he moved from San Francisco in the 90s, and how he won the science fair in seventh grade. Then he asked for $5. When I got home, my dad was furious that we’d objectified hi, “as if the homeless in this country don’t have enough of a problem.” It was one of our first real fights.

Jake’s Fish Store used to stink up all of 89th street. Then I think the Health Department shut it down. Next to it was Murray’s, a shoe-box-sized shop that made the best potato knishes. They were always best toasted the next morning for breakfast. When I was five, I accidentally spilled a whole barrel of coffee beans at Broadway Farms on 84th street. I remember the incident particularly well because some guy yelled at me and I was a goody-goody. The next day, they put up a sign that said “PLEASE KEEP CHILDREN AWAY FROM COFFEE BEANS.” That sign is still there and to this day I feel queasy and embarrassed when I see it. Then, two heavy glass doors, one doorman, one elevator man, and eight stories later there was home.

My dad and I took this walk home every weekday for all of elementary school. Even though I switched schools when I was thirteen, these thirty blocks represent what New York is to me. It is stability. It is how, even when my dad moved out and half my things were put into boxes, they were baking lemon poppy seed muffins at Samaad’s. It’s how, when I switched schools, the man on 97th street was still laminating his poems. How when my aunt got hit by a car, we came back from the hospital and heated up knish from Murrays. My history is intertwined with my neighborhood. Each store, every corner reminds me of a story or a time. New York is something in my life that I know can never completely change. Sure, the movie place closed two years ago and my walk home has changed, but the basic attitude—the way it functions—will always exist.

Before I left for Northwestern, my dad and I re-took our walk. It was the first time in a few months but nothing had really changed. We walked past Samaad’s and I laughed at the kids fighting over Odwalla. I found the pennies in Ida Strauss’s dress. I didn’t buy a muffin, though. And I didn’t take the pennies — I left them for some kid. Since this walk basically defines my first thirteen years, it makes me realize how lucky I am to no longer be a thirteen-year-old. It reminds me of how much I’ve changed. How I can hold my dad’s bike in one hand; how soon he might not be able to ride it. We must have crossed these thirty blocks a thousand times, and still, each time makes me nostalgic for the last.

Though there are many things that I miss that remind me that I was in the largest city in America (trying to find duck livers in Chinatown, weekly trips to the Met), the bulk of my New York memories happened between Columbia and Lincoln Center, Central Park and the Hudson River. My favorite thing about New York is that with about eight million people, three hundred square miles, and maybe a hundred different languages, I can still clearly picture every store-front on my way home.