(Southern) Autumn Report

Carlos Caso-Rosendi

Everything is upside down in this topsy-turvy world and this city of Buenos Aires is no exception. Autumn begins in March and Christmas comes in the summer. Resurrection Sunday will not coincide with the blooming of flowers everywhere but with rainy afternoons in neighborhoods covered with fallen leaves. We will have to use our imagination to see the resurrection represented in nature or … wait until September.

Here one has to make an extra effort to understand the northern hemisphere songs and poems that use the names of months to represent a mood. December may evoke a white landscape up there but here down-under it rather represents the fires of hell.

The Fall Season has arrived here in BA but green leaves are still holding and one can spot the occasional late spring flower.  Here at home in the 6th floor of an eight-story apartment building, I am trying to make the old windows winter-proof. Not an easy task but doable. Thank the Lord and DuPont Corporation for silicone. This winter, we are told, is going to be a hard one. I hope they are wrong. Where’s global warming when we need it? Even this last summer was quite mild, with a few cold days here an there.

I was hoping to finish all the long-promised writing but other issues took nearly all my time. You may have noticed I did not write much in this old blog. I spent many hours researching and now I have a lot of material to read. That is good. I am learning a lot and hopefully, I will have those books finished sometime soon. You had a small advance on the book about St. Peter in the last six articles of the series ending with Cross and Resurrection but I promise you there is a lot more.

A few friends have helped financially with my return to the US project. I am very grateful for their help and for all the readers that pray and send donations and words of Christian encouragement. I have many friends I did not have when I started writing this blog in Virginia, years ago. I am very grateful for their friendship.

I sense that my return to the US may be imminent but God must be keeping me here for some reason. I tried — and I will keep trying — to put my time in Buenos Aires to good use but I sense when all my Northern friends welcome their Fall Season (as the presidential elections happen in Argentina) things may become “interesting” here. It does not look good now — no matter who wins the coming elections, the current economic crisis is bound to continue and there may be “troubles” in the Irish sense of the word. I hope I am wrong. Most of all, I hope I am not stuck here during a Venezuela-style crisis. It is time to pray for this country that has endured more than a century of “saviors of the people” and still cannot get the notion that there is only one Savior, and He does not belong to any political party.

Reporting from Buenos Aires, just a few blocks from the Rio de la Plata and not far from the intersection of Washington and Monroe streets. Quite a curious coincidence there. Yet, the river is not the cold Delaware… but the wide, lion-colored River Plate.