{"id":6420,"date":"2005-12-12T21:41:25","date_gmt":"2005-12-12T21:41:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/12\/storied-houses.html"},"modified":"2005-12-12T21:41:25","modified_gmt":"2005-12-12T21:41:25","slug":"storied-houses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/12\/storied-houses.html","title":{"rendered":"Storied Houses"},"content":{"rendered":"

A lovely piece from Touchstone<\/em> by Emily Stimpson, one of the ECB – Early Catholic Bloggers. <\/a><\/p>\n

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The stories also have a bit of mystery in them. Mystery exists in the very design of my house\u2014unexpected stairways and odd angles meet you at every turn. Traces of the families who lived here before me add to the mystery\u2014battered children\u2019s toys buried in the backyard and letters of the alphabet scrawled inside closet walls. I don\u2019t really believe in ghosts, but something lingers in the rooms where others once walked. The Church teaches that we are never alone, that the angels and saints are always present to us. Somehow, my house bears witness to that.<\/p>\n

But the most vivid story these old houses tell is a story of a world where homes were not designed around television sets, where children and parents gathered around the dinner table each night for food and conversation, and where neighbors spent summer evenings on each other\u2019s front porches, chatting and gossiping while their children ran through the streets. Family prayers, not the latest episode of Survivor,<\/em> ended the day. Bigger was not always better. Love meant something more than quality time.<\/p>\n

In my house, the kitchen is small, with no room for industrial-size appliances. The bedroom closets are miniscule. There is one full bath, no Great Room, and no Master Suite. But for ninety years, large families filled this house. One had five children, another eight. Despite the lack of counter space, the mothers managed to cook three meals a day. Even without jetted tubs and designer faucets, their families presented themselves respectably and on time at school and office. The closets held what was needed, nothing more.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A lovely piece from Touchstone by Emily Stimpson, one of the ECB – Early Catholic Bloggers. The stories also have a bit of mystery in them. Mystery exists in the very design of my house\u2014unexpected stairways and odd angles meet you at every turn. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. 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