I am the highway

For the first four years of Derrick's and my marriage we spent anywhere from a week to a month driving around the southwest, visiting various places in the southwest, but always including the San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado. The whole time we listened to music--usually Derrick's CD's. Audioslave featured prominently in the rotation, and so now when I hear tracks from the album it feels like I'm listening to the soundtrack of Derrick's and my early travels together.

It was with great sadness that I heard Chris Cornell, the lead singer of Audioslave and Soundgarden, died yesterday. We've lost quite a number of musicians I grew up listening to, and those losses have hit hard in their own ways. The soundtrack of dead musicians from my childhood is growing so long, and will inevitably consume them all.

And yet there will is new music and there will be new musicians. There will be new people to listen and sing along, and more drives to take through beautiful desert vistas and flower-draped mountain passes. There are more words to sing and more dances to dance and words to write, only now by different hands and voices and feet.