"Where to?" I asked as the car-house blew the heat out of my luscious black fur.
"We've got two days left," Mom counted. "We could go back into Nevada tomorrow or keep heading back toward home."
"I've seen Nevada," I said. "What's on the way home?"
"The Sierra Nevada," she said, like that explained anything.
"No, California," I corrected her.
"The Sierra Nevada is in California," Mom lied like a rug. "Nevada just means snowy in Spanish."
"It means what?"
"Snowy."
"What?"
"Snow is what happens when it rains in a cold climate," Mom said, like that explained anything. "You've seen snow on the ground before. It's the white stuff on top of mountains."
"You mean clouds? How can a cloud fall on the ground?"
"Snow, like I said. You saw snow up close on top of that mountain in Utah, remember? When we went to that frozen lake."
"That time that you were too scared to get out of the car-house and high-tailed it to the desert as fast as you could? Snow thank you." I took a moment to think about Mom's puzzle. "If nevada means covered in snow, what does california mean?"
"It means hot like an oven," Mom translated.
It was a tough choice. I don't like the oven-baked feeling of heat, but Mom turned into a whiny baby in the cold. If nevada meant "cold" but Nevada was hot, and california meant "hot" but wasn't as hot as Nevada, then what in the world was Sarah Nevada like? There was a baked Alaska joke in there somewhere, but my mind was too tied in knots find it. "What do you think we should do?" I asked finally.
"Let's go to the Sierras," Mom said. "Hopefully there isn't much snow."
"Good plan," I agreed. "But be careful. This snow nonsense sounds like nasty stuff."
We continued driving out of Death Valley through a desert so deserted that the most interesting thing to look at were the shadows of the clouds on the ground. 'Clouds, leaving skidmarks on mountains?' I scoffed as the hum of the car-house made my eyelids heavy. 'I wasn't born yesterday. Obviously clouds make it darker when they fall to earth." Lulled into a sense of safety, I stretched out in the sunspot on the bed and was asleep in no time.
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