Or what is to love about Connecticut? Let us be honest, loving Connecticut is hard. At least a few people I am related to despise it. I am more than capable of holding it up as an example of all that is wrong politically, culturally, environmentally, etc.
This bit of Connecticut earns no ‘cool’ points: it isn’t a chi-chi Berkshire town, it isn’t chic urban, it isn’t dramatic mountain/ocean/’wilderness’ vacation escapism, it isn’t romantic Southern charm, it isn’t even genuine rural or genuine ‘small-town’. In general people look at Connecticut and say (usually the same person) it isn’t chic urban and it isn’t quality ‘wilderness’ so why care about it? And history? It is the center of the industrial country that won the North that dispute of the 1860s, that made the West possible, that drove America’s rise for nearly 150 years. Webster, Whitney, Winchester, Colt, Pratt, Sikorsky, Ovation… but industry is a dirty word…
Well, you don’t fall in love with it immediately. It isn’t the sort of place with jaw dropping vistas. Maybe you have to have bad, uncorrected vision, because you fall in love with it through little incremental things. The structure of brickwork in an old mill town, the multitude of architectural and cultural types, the mist on the river, hoar frost in the winter, foggy mornings, the rain lifting off the blue hills, the hundred different greens that change through the season, you have to fall in love with trees first, Connecticut is 68% forest even though it is one of the most densely populated states. Fall colour and spring flowers, asters to daffodils, goldenrod to trillium. Fireflies and migrant warblers, the horned owl deep in the sharp winter night. There is great beauty, but it is fleeting. In Connecticut familiarity breeds love, contempt is bred by inattention. The mist lasts for an hour, the fall colour shifts and is gone. These are scenes that demand constant attention. You blink driving down the road and the astonishing vista of New England is gone, a trick of light, of space and time.
It has all four seasons, but never brutal; you can’t earn macho points for living through them, but you don’t need to either. And perhaps that is part of its attraction. Connecticut doesn’t offer you excuses or convenient images to hide behind. There is no romance, so you can’t pretend to be romantic. If you plant something, and it is in the right zone, there is no excuse here for it not to grow…on the other hand, it won’t grow without some effort on your part. No casual tropical flowers here, but also no excuses of heroism in the face of the climate when you get only a single rose.
Connecticut is a human sized landscape with enough land that a person’s stewardship or lack of stewardship has direct results. In an urban landscape, the land is ‘other’ elsewhere, one’s actions seem to have no visible effect; in areas of the West, the land is a constant force so great that one can feel that one’s actions will not even be noticed by that greatness, even if they are visible; in Connecticut the land is a partner for good or ill.
Acair Fearann 
I think that at least part of what you are sensing is that essential feeling of “being at home”. So often the answer to “How can you love this place so much?” is, as the most basic statement, “It’s home”. Wrapped up in that is complete familiarity; with the recurring place-events of the turn of the year, with your movement in those events, with your non-aware as well as aware enjoyment of the habits of the place and you together. Most humans (and undoubtedly many other animals) have an innate ability to know some place as home. (A few, I think, do not, and those individuals remain rootless not only in space but in many other relationships.) “Home” is often where one had one’s childhood experiences; if not there, then it may be where one had later, but equally indelibly meaningful ones. “Home” is where you fit, not always completely and comfortably, but sufficiently so so that being there is pleasant and returning there brings a sense of being welcome and relaxed. Is it possible to have more than one “home”? For some people, no. For others, yes. Certainly for me Esperanza is “home” in many, many ways. But so is the Southwest. At the point in my life when I had to make a “home” choice decision and was free, also, to do so, I chose the Southwest, and would probably make that choice again. But whenever I come to Esperanza I come “home” in ways that are wonderful and deeply felt.