Fall comes with a soundtrack
If you hear the church bells again, thank the cooler weather.
This time of year, if you live in Goodwood or thereabouts, you can hear the bells of Our Lady of Mercy. That’s the nice part. The less heavenly sounds carry farther, too: the steady roar of I-10 and the warning whistles of trains moving around downtown and River Bend.
The main reason is something called a temperature inversion. On cool fall and winter mornings, the air near the ground is often colder than the air above it. That warmer layer acts like a ceiling, bending sound that would normally rise and drift away back toward the ground.
It’s also quieter this time of year. The cicadas and their friends aren’t quite as frantic. And once the house drops below 72 degrees, the air conditioner finally shuts off for the first time since roughly April.
So the church bells ring a little clearer. And you get an earlier heads-up that the damn train is about to block traffic between downtown and LSU.
