The weather is warm and dry, but your grandmother still wants the fire to be hot. She’s making a clay pot, and fire is how the pot gets finished. The heat bakes it until it’s hard.
Someday when you’re old enough, you might get to make pots, too. So you watch closely as she carefully shapes the clay pot. You hope it turns out right. A good pot can be traded to another tribe for food or something else your family needs.
Many desert people built their homes out of brush because they had few other resources. Cahuilla houses were usually dome-shaped or rectangular. Mojave people lived in some of the hottest parts of the desert. Temperatures could get really high, especially in the summer. To keep cool during the hottest times of the year, the Cahuilla and Mojave sometimes built homes that had roofs but no walls.
