What's the best thing about where you live?

     This place that I call home, as I now have lived here longer than any other place I have live, can be the best of places and the worst of places.
     Its moments when it's the best of places usually come when I am outside and out of town in the backcountry.  The small nature of our town; only 3 square miles, is that "out there" is only a hop, skip and  a jump away.  In a few minutes I can be deep in the mountains that surround Aspen, no signs of civilization for as far as I can see.   Or, in this case, the photo shows that the signs of man's passing are only the signs that he used to be here, but he is gone now, leaving his monuments and structures to moulder away back into the earth.

     Or, if I must be in town, I can sit on green grass outside a huge white tent that is housing hundreds of world class musicians playing the last refrains of a summer's worth of music. 
      Or, I can go listen to the Dali Lama speak in an intimate setting, or, watch the nominated Oscar films in a 100 year-old opera house sitting in real, honest to goodness purple upholstered seats.  Or, if I must, catch some unbelievable youngsters (everybody is a youngster to me, so get over it!) fly through the air on snowboards or skis and do tricks and flips that I didn't really think people could do, until I saw them do them!
     But probably the best thing about this place is, as Glen Fry said, all my friends are here.  A small tight group of people that I count as friends whether they be work friends or those outside of work that I see way too little of both.
     For a while, I thought about leaving this place.  Back in '98, a series of tragedies that seemed to never end thinned out my family to where I just wanted to sit down and give up.  That's when I thought I really had no more ties to this community until I realized that what had sustained me through those awful few years were the friends that I could count on my two battered hands had stood quietly by me.