how does memory make a place? how can being in a place re-place its memory?

i love staying in certain places for lots of reasons:

what their smells reminds me of;
the refuge they can offer from more difficult places;
what they teach me;
so i can bring them to people i love, and when i'm lucky, vice versa.

 the above is an email I sent to my ex-husband the other day.  We haven't shared the same place since 2005, but the last 'scape we co-navigated was New York City's, when we were both adjusting to emigrant status.  Los Angeles transplants, we made sense of winter and odd phenomena like close proximity (propinquity, i later learned in my fancy pants grad school classes) in our own westerly ways, through lenses set on our noses by a very differently-mapped place.  we had ways of referring to the miserable, all-weather-under-equipped chinese food bike delivery guy in our neighborhood--the epitome of human suffering--and coined various other quips to help us stay on top of New York's streets. 

My first winter without Ron was miserable.  So, too, my 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th, after which i scurried home for a year's respite in Los Angeles.  Those winters I fared by bike alone, without day's end swapped stories about frozen knees and snot and the revelation of a new strategic layering technique (one that kept you warm but not sweaty, even in the armpits), or charming NYPD out of giving me a ticket for running a red light. 
But I wished the whole way that I was better accompanied. 
Memory of that earlier, shared place kept me from delighting in the now place that--asphalt be praised!--I was making my own without even knowing it, crossing a new East River bridge than that which we'd shared.  Still, every third pedal stroke stirred the Ron-sized-void in me.  I didn't learn how deeply the 'asphalt be praised' had run into me until I left, returned to sunnier climes.  I missed it the whole time.

It's my first winter back in New York City, and I am loving every blast of wind's whimsy, and frigid bike ride into and out of Manhattan.  I've learned what body parts must be warm and how to protect them, and which can weather some cold.  I've learned that the usually W/NWerly wind this time of year resists me in the morning, and urges me back home in the evening.  And that the air temp can even be warmer at night!  And more than that, I recognize other year-round commuters, or people that reliably fill the places I pass, and they too are my personal place-markers.

But now that I live in downtown Brooklyn, my commute isn't long enough so I usually meander the crooked north Brooklyn coast, crossing the Williamsburg Bridge and reveling in the Midtown Manhattan view north along the bi-directional bikeway along Kent Ave. through Williamsburg, to Franklin Ave. in Greenpoint, to Newtown Creek, and then back, hugging the waterfront as warmly as I feel embraced by her.  I wasn't ever before open to being place- (and cold-) permeated like this.

I wrote to Ron (who never responds) the other day out of delight instead of longing for companionship.  During my 2 am ride home the night before, I'd laughed aloud about the seasonal phenomenon of sidewalks sprouting douglas firs tended by Montreal and East European urban foresters we've got here in New York--an image I'd never shared with anyone, and didn't need to.
 
Five years after, I am making my own place, and we love each other.