Last week I was at the store looking for a new travel soap dish. There’s nothing wrong with the one I’m currently using, unless you count the rubber band holding it together because the top snapped off. I also have a second soap dish in our bathroom cabinet that doesn’t stay closed, so it also needs a rubber band to hold it together. Why do I keep it, you ask? Because everyone has soap dishes and other household items held together by rubber bands. Don’t they?

All right, then. What about salad tongs? Come on, you can’t tell me I’m the only one whose broken plastic salad tongs have been held together by rubber bands. It’s not because I was emotionally attached to plastic salad tongs. I just didn’t have anything else to use for salad until I finally remembered to buy new tongs, which was a good thing since I was going through too many rubber bands holding them together.

No matter what you use or don’t use them for, we can’t be the only house that’s been taken over by a never-ending supply of rubber bands. They come from newspapers, or grocery items, or they appear out of nowhere. I have an old coffee mug of bands that don’t stretch enough to help with much, flimsy bands that break the second you stretch them, and three bands that are the perfect width and density. Those, however, are now cracked and useless because I couldn’t find them among the rubber band rubble when I needed them.

What can you do about a rubber band overrun? I Googled it.

Donate them to a school, said Google. You could just about build a school out of rubber bands with the stock in this house. Use them to tie up long cords on cell phone chargers or hair dryers when traveling. Right, because you think I’m coordinated enough to disentangle a rubber band from another cord when I need the charger or dryer. Have you seen me try to take off the dang twisty thing off a head of lettuce? And that’s with no elasticity involved.

Another suggestion was to reseal cereal or chip bags with a rubber band. That’s a wonderful idea, as long as you remember you still have leftover cereal or chips. Otherwise, it turns into a stale sack of remnants that will remain largely ignored until the next massive cabinet cleanout.

I’ve never tried wrapping a rubber band under the output spout of a soap dispenser. If you have young children, this might be a great idea because it limits how much soap they can dispense. If you’ve ever entered the bathroom to find your sink, entire counter, and part of the wall covered in soap, you’re welcome for the suggestion.

Because my age is starting to show (we’re not going to say what it’s showing, exactly), wrapping a band around jar lids to make them easier to grip and open is a viable option. Which rubber band should I use? The thick one with the durability to hold three lobster claws or the 37 pens on my counter? A couple of thin bands that insist on multiplying like rabbits on my counters? The jury’s still out on that one, so I’ll have to test them both and get back to you… or keep it to myself because really, who goes on about rubber bands for a whole column? That answer to that is: humor writers.

We have to be flexible that way.

Janine Talbot recently published a story about her first kiss in “Laugh Out Loud: 40 Women Humorists Celebrate Then and Now… Before We Forget,” available through Amazon. She lives in southern Maine. Email Janine at janinevtalbot@gmail.com.