The drafty add-on to my grandparents’ house was a place of fun, quiet, mystery or adventure. Not part of the original floorplan, it needed a single step from the kitchen to bridge the gap between the floor levels. We called that add-on the den, and when someone went to the den, they were “down in the den.”

When I was very small, and Mom’s three sisters still lived with their parents, the den had enough space for a piano. Grandma would thump out no-frills versions of the old hymns on it, or Aunt Naomi’s fingers would fly over the keys in more artful arrangements of Christian songs. A small group could gather round to belt out those hymns and gospel songs in four-part harmony.

In a time when people did more with less, my grandparents even hosted a church potluck once. Guests overflowed the small house: in the living room, where they squeezed onto couches and chairs balancing laden, gravy-soaked paper plates on knees clenched together, through the dining room out the kitchen into the den, spilling onto the back porch, and into the yard, crammed elbow-to-elbow around rickety card tables.

I was five. Down in the den before people started arriving, a delectable scent wafted from the kitchen where Grandma, Mom, and a couple of my aunts maneuvered around each other preparing food: Grandma was trying a new recipe, potato chip-crusted fried chicken.

I was in love. For years afterwards, at church potlucks, family gatherings, or any time someone mentioned fried chicken might be on the menu, I’d wait, eager and hopeful, for the golden-crunchy, juicy treat running with grease. I’ve never had it since, though.

Still, that room birthed many other wonderful experiences. Grandma’s business, Esther’s Book Stall, sold old and rare books. Aside from the local flea market where she set up shop each weekend, most of her business was mail order in those pre-Internet days. Stuffed like the guests at the potluck, her inventory filled her small house. Bookcases lined one side of the narrow hallway, each shelf stacked two or three deep with books. There were bookcases in the pocket-sized living room and in her bedroom, too. But the den housed the bulk of her books on shelves that covered one long wall of the den. After her daughters left home, the piano vanished, and the floor space was subdivided into cubicles of bookshelves.