Sunday Porch Conversations · When the Season Doesn’t Break

You don’t get out of some seasons. You get through them. There is a difference, and it matters.

It is the twenty-third of August and it was 108 yesterday. It will be 108 today. Nobody here checks the forecast anymore — we’ve given that up the way you give up shaking a vending machine. This is the stretch of a Phoenix summer that visitors don’t understand: seventy-some days over a hundred degrees, no break, no rumor of a break, and September’s promises mean nothing because we’ve all been lied to by September before.

This whole summer of letters is named for this exact stretch. So this morning I want to say the thing the entire season has been walking toward:

Some seasons of a life don’t break either.
And nobody prepares us for those.

We are trained for storms — sudden, dramatic, survivable-with-casseroles. What we are not trained for is the long heat: the grief that’s still here in year four. The marriage repairing at the speed of a glacier. The diagnosis that isn’t a battle but a climate. The prayer from Week 4 of this porch, still unanswered. The child, the debt, the body, the loneliness — the thing that has simply become the weather you live in. And because everything around us is built on before-and-after stories, we quietly conclude that a season with no “after” in sight must be a personal failure.

Here’s my chapter. I have spent embarrassing amounts of my life trying to solve seasons that were only ever asking to be survived. I treated endurance like a consolation prize for people who couldn’t figure out the exit. I strategized, optimized, prayed with deadlines attached. And underneath all that industriousness was a quiet arrogance I can only see now: the belief that every season owed me a door. Some don’t have one. Some seasons only have a through.

And the people still in the long heat while I was demanding doors? I secretly filed them under “stuck.” God forgive me. I know better now, because I’ve been the woman in year four of a season everyone else assumed should be finished. There is nothing stuck about her. She is doing the heaviest lifting there is — it just doesn’t photograph well.

Now come stand at the rail with me, because I want to show you something. That’s a saguaro out there. It will live two hundred years in a place that spends every summer trying to kill it. It didn’t negotiate with the desert. It became the kind of thing that can live here — slow, deep-rooted, storing up every drop of the rare rain. The desert doesn’t apologize for what it is.

The desert doesn’t apologize for what it is.
And neither do the people it makes.

Because here is what I have found, and this is the porch turn of the entire summer: long-season people are unmistakable. You have met them. There is a steadiness in them that no comfortable life has ever produced — a way of not flinching at your bad news, of never offering you a timeline, of sitting in silence like it’s furniture. They are not impressive the way sprinters are impressive. They are impressive the way load-bearing walls are. And every single one of them was built in a stretch that didn’t break when they begged it to.

I am not going to romanticize this — we don’t do that on this porch. I would not wish my long seasons on anyone, and I won’t insult yours by calling it a gift. The heat is just the heat. But what grew in me there — the deep roots, the stored rain, the stubborn unhurried aliveness — that’s real, and it’s mine, and nothing that arrives with a season’s change can take it back out of me. The season didn’t give me anything. But it turns out I grew there anyway. Those are different sentences, and the second one is the true one.

Stop asking the season when it will break.
Start asking what kind of thing can live here.
Then become it.

No bow, as always. Your long heat is still hot, and mine is too, and September has lied to us both before. But if you are in year two, or four, or eleven of a season everyone else assumes should be finished — you are not stuck, you are not behind, and you are not failing at exits. You are becoming a load-bearing person in a world that desperately needs them.

And on the mornings you can’t believe any of that — come sit here. The porch is 108 degrees and full of company. We are a whole neighborhood of things that learned to live in the heat.

With warmth from the porch,

Kristi

❦

About the Author

Kristi M. Estrada, LPC-S, NCC, SEP, is a licensed professional counselor-supervisor and somatic trauma therapist in Phoenix, Arizona, founder of Kristi Estrada, LPC-S, SEP & Associates, and the creator of Trauma Restorative Care™. Known to many as The Healing Servant, she writes at the intersection of nervous system science, attachment repair, and a faith that has been through the fire and walks with a limp — held deeply, never handed to the reader as a requirement. There’s a seat on this porch whether you pray or not. Kristi’s writing is shaped as much by what she has survived as by what she has studied, which is why she doesn’t offer tidy answers — she’s never been healed by one. Her Sunday Porch Conversations reach clients, clinicians, and everyday readers who are tired of tidy answers and ready for true ones. Learn more at healingservant.com.