I drove to London today. And to Palestine. And right past the turnoff for Toad Suck Park. If these clues leave you going “hunh?” then you haven’t been to Arkansas lately. 🙂

We’re doing a family road trip, moving my son & daughter-in-law & grandson to Virginia. That’s quite a ways from the family house — where we’ve all been for the past 2+ weeks, along w/ Rufus the giant cat & Silas the terminally cute rescue dog — in Tulsa.

If you drive the breadth of Arkansas, right along the middle (like a bright ribbon around a present), you drive through London & Palestine. And you really do drive past Toad Suck Park. Look it up!

So, besides the pleasure of my husband’s witty conversation, and seeing the landscape change from the overpasses of Tulsa to the wooded highway verges of Arkansas, I also had the fun of map surprises.

Which brings me to seeing the world new & fresh, a critical element of being here, now, in the Buddhist frame of beginner’s heart. Because there’s something quite lovely about thinking about these two magical places — both of which I’ve been lucky enough to visit — move around the globe. I’m enchanted just thinking about Big Ben and the Tower of London coming unstuck from their places and drifting over the Atlantic to Arkansas. And perhaps if Palestine got the annual rainfall of Arkansas, tempers would cool…?

Not to mention… Toad Suck? What a great name! Supposedly from the way steamboat crews ‘sucked up bottles’ at the local watering hole until they ‘swelled like toads,’ I prefer to think about toads. Real toads. Sucking…whatever a toad would suck if a toad could suck whatever.

So today’s leg of our family road trip is dedicated to places and the names that don’t always identify them. To the poetry of those names, and the dreamy images they conjure. To the seductive crawl of the red Arkansas highway (and yes, it’s really red in places — not grey at all!) beneath our wheels, and to a country where you can have London, Palestine, and Toad Suck Park all within driving distance.