The Room That Kept Becoming
- Kim Hannan - Artist
- Aug 17
- 5 min read
Many homes have a room like this one. Not the room anyone plans for — the room that just keeps changing jobs, quietly, decade after decade, until nobody quite remembers what it was to begin with.
In my parents' mid-60s home, that room started life as The Dining Room. It's a modest 11.5' x 11' square just off the kitchen, and for the first stretch of my childhood, it mostly sat empty — we didn't yet own a formal dining set, so the space waited, patient and undecided, until Mom finally found a small table to put in it. And she added a few other family pieces along the way, too — a pie safe and an antique wash stand, both still there today.
Even furnished, it wasn't a room anyone used much. Except once.
The Night of the Fondue Pot
I'd only been dating him a few weeks — this college boy from New England I'd go on to marry — when his birthday rolled around. I was living at home, which gave this broke college student a little more opportunity to be ambitious in cooking a birthday meal than a dorm kitchen ever would. My younger brother and sister were under strict orders to stay out — I was hosting, and they weren't invited to contribute their teasing or sarcasm.
I knew three things about him: he loved steak, he loved baked potatoes, and he loved strawberry shortcake. The steak I got as one good cut, sliced into bites, marinated, and cooked together at the table in a fondue pot — which I thought was terribly romantic, and which he had genuinely never encountered before in his life. He played along admirably. The potato, I got right.
Dessert is where the two of us — he growing up in a New England home, myself one generation removed from Southern Appalachia — discovered that "strawberry shortcake" doesn't mean the same thing in every family.
He was expecting shortcake the way his mother made it: a sweet biscuit, sugared strawberries, whipped cream. What I set in front of him was my Mamaw's version — four very thin, soft layers, somewhere between a pie crust and a soft sugar cookie, each one baked separately in the same pan. Sliced strawberries, sugared down into their own syrup, went between every layer, and the whole thing rested overnight so the syrup could soften everything into one unified cake. I did it up the Appalachian way — bowl, cream, a spoon, almost like a soup — sugar bowl and saucer right alongside, the way Mamaw always served it.
He was completely baffled. He was also, apparently, charmed enough to stick around — forty-four years and counting. These days, the shortcake on our table is usually the New England kind. But I'll always love my Mamaw's.
A Room That Kept Filling Up, and Emptying Out
That dinner turned out to be the room's first great moment as an actual dining room. Life kept happening around it instead.
In the late 1990s, my parents bought a beautiful formal dining set — mahogany stained cherry wood, with a china hutch and sideboard to match. Beautiful. Also, if we're honest, a little too much furniture for an 11.5-foot room. Overhead the whole time hung the room's one true original — a chandelier that had been there since the house was built, and entirely Mom's to love. Every year, she gave the crystals a careful vinegar-water bath, and it always shone for it. Mom installed the new dining set beneath it and loved hosting there, right up until the practical truth of the square footage caught up with her.
When the front living room stopped being used as a formal space, she made the obvious move: the dining set relocated to that bigger 12' x 20' room, and The Dining Room sat empty again, waiting for its next assignment.
Becoming the Music Room
So she moved her baby grand piano in.
Few people in the current era have a set-aside music room. Mom did. She named it, treasured it, and practiced there often, and when the grandkids came to visit, they'd gather around and sing while she played, the chandelier still shining overhead the way it always had. It was in this new chapter of the room that she chose the bold salmon paint — a color as confident as the room had finally become.
When she began cancer treatment, her strength for playing piano faded. The baby grand had given way to a smaller digital one, and family keepsakes started finding their way into the room's furniture — tucked into the pie safe, set on the washstand, wherever there was space. Slowly, the room shifted again, into something more like a pretty hallway than a destination: a walk-through with garage access on one end, plastic grocery bags collecting in corners, spare drinks stacked under the card table, big skillets and a crockpot stored on the pie safe's lower shelves.
And when her fight with cancer ended, that card table and the old washstand got pushed together one more time — this time to hold the overflow of food that loving friends brought by the carload, the way they do in the South.
For 14 years, the music room was a drop zone that was occasionally visited for music...playing piano for Great Grandaddy, and singing as a family. Note the fishing poles, tools and other items that began to collect over time.
Fourteen Years of a Room Holding Its Breath
Nothing changed much after that. Fourteen years later, the table and washstand were still pushed together. Water bottles and soda cases still sat underneath. It had settled fully into drop-zone duty — the place you passed through without quite seeing.
But by the back door, under the pretty wrought-iron key holder, Mom's collection of hats — the ones she'd gathered during chemo — still hung exactly where she'd left them. For years, walking in or out, the instinct was to reach out and touch them and her jacket beside them, undisturbed.
Coming Back to Its Prime
Today, the room looks a good deal like it did in its finest years as a music room. The stray keys, the lone screwdriver, the years of accumulated grocery bags — gone, tossed or given a proper home elsewhere. Family can walk in now and actually use the space again: for music, for cards, for one of Mom's many half-finished puzzles waiting on the table.
An artfully varied set of antique chairs circle that card table now. Her family antique crocks, vases and other such are arranged with real intention — not stored, not forgotten, but curated, the way you'd arrange the things that tell the story of generations who loved this house and each other well.
It took becoming a dining room, then a music room, then a drop zone, then a music room again for this space to find its way back to itself. Some rooms just take the long way home, this room that kept becoming.
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