The Junk Drawer: Every Home Has One.
Welcome to the junk drawer, y'all. Here you find curious items and interesting tidbits that belong in Appalachia but are sometimes too unique or strange to fit anywhere else. The Junk drawer is full of family memorabilia, tools, old appliance manuals, newspaper clippings, and those things you stumble on that make you ponder how it got there because you don't recognize it at all.
So, poke around a bit and see what you can find. You may very well stumble onto something that feels like it belongs to you.
Treasures From The Mountains
Some things don’t belong on a shelf. They belong in a drawer.
Here you might find a jar of purple honey with bee lore tucked beside it, an old rainbow mushroom pin that opens into Appalachian queer, trans, and intersex belonging resources, a scrap of family memory, a strange bit of folk knowledge, or a link worth saving.
This junk drawer is a living collection of small things worth keeping — useful, curious, tender, odd, and rooted. Each one carries its own story.
What Your Kin Wonders About When You've Passed On...
There's the things you expect to find in a junk drawer and those you wonder how in the Sam Hill they found their way there.
Maybe you’ll find an odd folk saying, some found-object that's attached to a story, tiny remedies, mystery objects, and scraps of family history that still know how to speak of you aim to listen
"What’s this?” becomes an invitation. A strange little object may open into an archive, an oral history, a public resource, a teaching tool, or a story somebody lost and we found.
They might not ought to be on a main page, but they are part of the deeper knowing — the small, useful, stubborn wisdom Appalachia keeps tucked away.
A Space for Everyone to Explore
If you’re stumblin' onto this site for the first time or coming back to see what else we got tucked away, the Junk Drawer is meant for you. Junk drawers are kinda like life, ever changing and full of what gets swept out of sight.
It is a place to feel human, curious, and alive — full of scraps, signs, stories, tools, memories, ticket stubs, receipts and odd little doorways into Appalachian life.
Leave knowing Appalachia ain't froze in the past. It is still thinking, remembering, changing, protecting its people, and leaving small lights on for whoever needs to find their way back home.