Where I live

This week's List Friday prompt at Pomegranates & Paper is Why I love where I live. Yes. I do love where I live. Where do I live? In my skin, in any one of a half-dozen chairs in any one of a half-dozen places, In my house, my garden, my town, this county, this country... If home is where the heart is, my heart can be many places. I live in groups of women, groups of writers, I live at times with my head bent over books in a library, and I live a good deal of the time in cyber-space, circling, circling with all you good people in the land of Blog. Why do I love where I live? Ten reasons? (Ten of the reasons, not the top ten reasons, mind you!)

1. Corny, cliched, but on a day like today, I am going to say the Forty Shades of Green visible travelling anywhere here. Today I just drove twenty miles, along a familiar route, but this day, in the April sunlight, my breath was caught at every turn of the road.
2. Certain places along the road from here to my home-town, where land and sea merge into a misty, mystical-looking magical land.
3. The Genista that are holding tight little buds at the moment, ready to burst into wild, mad yellow bloom at the top of my garden, flinging their golden light through my kitchen window throughout most of May. I think of them as my son's birthday candles.
4. The Women's Centre where I volounteer and the writing group that meet there. Nurturing, open, welcoming, a place of healing and fun and growth. I love it.
5. I love the people who will chat in a queue or smile at me in a grocery-shop when I find myself reciting my shopping-list aloud, or just comment at the price of something, or the weather.
6. I love the worn-down couch in my study where I sit to write my morning-pages. It came from my Grandmother's house, and I love that I get to be the one to have that link with her.
7. When I drive around this county, I am so taken with the beauty and the diversity of the landscape - from rich, fertile, rolling farms to wild, barren mountainslopes.
8. When I open my back-door on a morning where spring meets summer, and step outside to the damp but warming-up smell of earth, I just love where I live. If there's a thrush or blackbird about, so much the better. If something new has bloomed - riches.
9. I love the opportunity to go to ancient places - stone circles, and ring-forts, to feel the energy of a time before our time, to feel myself as a small thing in the huge circle of time and life.
10. Being in a place where at any given time, on any given day, there are friends about who will join me for coffee, for lunch, for chat, for company. This is one of the priceless things about where I live that makes it a place to love, that makes it home.

What do you love about where you live?