ROBIN WRITES: The Junk Drawer

By Editor | January 27, 2026 |

By Robin Garrison Leach

A house is not a home without a junk drawer. It’s the one place everybody in your house will sooner or later find themselves rummaging through, muttering frantic words, like: “I KNOW I saw it in here yesterday!” and “SURELY we didn’t throw that away.”
Our junk drawer is in the kitchen. It is the biggest, most accessible drawer in the room. When we moved into our house, I dumped the stuff I had saved from our previous home’s junk drawer inside the new one. Now we had all our old junk, and with this new, bigger drawer, we would have plenty of room for new junk.
There is nothing like the sight of all those loose buttons and odd keys to make a person feel at home.
Think about it. As long as you have your junk, you probably have just what you need to fix or begin or complete almost job. Of course, you don’t want to do those things RIGHT NOW, but—boy—when you’re ready…what you need is right there in that junk drawer.
For some reason, wives are usually held accountable for knowing exactly what’s in the junk drawer. We should know IF it’s in there, HOW it got in there and even WHY it’s still in there.
Questions and accusations fire at me as John scrapples like a dog digging under a fence for a tiny screwdriver I haven’t seen since Bush was President.
“Who had it last? I could find it if all this junk wasn’t in here!”
Sure. There are things that may not be needed right away. I have a gravity-defying “Space Pen” that will write at any angle (once I buy a new ink refill for it). Dollar Tree earbuds in case we can’t find our “good ones.” The directions to countertop appliances I’ve relegated to upper cabinets. I might use them sometime. I’ll need to know how.
There’s a big “8”–shaped birthday candle that will no doubt come in handy again when John and I turn the big 80. I’ll only have to buy the “0”.
Batteries roll around like balls in a bingo cage. No idea if they’re good or not. But we keep them, and buy a new 8-pack of AA batteries whenever we need some. The ones in there are extras.
If I need a ruler, there’s a broken one in there. It goes to 7 inches. I can add.
I may never need to buy Scotch tape again; there are at least three in the junk drawer. However, each Christmas we seem to forget we have them. We buy a three-pack and use the new tape while the old ones lay yellowing and brittle. But throw them out? Then we wouldn’t have any.
The junk drawer is a time capsule of leftover screws from semi-successful furniture assemblies, dice cubes from childhood games, and pens with defunct business names and questionable writing quality. If I wanted to know what color the walls had been painted last time, I’m sure there’s a matching paint chip somewhere among the detritus my fingers brush, along the bottom of the drawer.
When I’m not sure where something small goes, I know it can go in the junk drawer. One thumbtack may not seem worthy of saving, but what if I need just one thumbtack? If I can find that one thumbtack, I will have avoided spending a dollar on an entire card of them.
I consider my junk drawer a kind of savings account of objects that may lose interest for a year or two, but become valuable when the time is right.
And so, we keep it all…every useless bit.
Just in case.
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■ Robin is a freelance columnist who lives and writes in Quincy, Illinois. Contact her at [email protected].