A day or two ago, my husband, Clif, and I were heating some soup for lunch, and we discovered that the cracker jar was pretty much empty. Clif is of the opinion that soup without crackers is not worth eating, but we had some choices. We could drive to Hannaford, which admittedly is only a couple of miles away, and we could buy a box of crackers. We could also bike to the grocery store. Or we could rummage through our cupboards and take stock of what we already had. We chose the last option and found a half stack of stale saltines as well as some stale oyster crackers.

Clif said, “Let’s do what my parents always did with stale crackers. Spread them on a cookie sheet and bake them in a 350 oven until the crackers are brown.”

This we did, and the crackers were pretty tasty. In fact, I liked them better that way. Baked and browned, they were very crispy and had a toasted flavor. So, chalk one up for Clif’s Yankee parents, a frugal couple who didn’t believe in wasting things.

My Franco-American parents were that way, too. I suppose it had something to do with growing up poor in Maine. From an early age, they learned to take good care of the things they had and to use what was on hand whenever possible. (They were also very generous, thus proving that frugality and generosity are not mutually exclusive.) My father was also a scrounge extraordinaire, and he passed on his love of scrounging to me.

Regrettably, I did not inherit my father’s knack for being handy. I am about as handy as our dog, Liam, and if we were both stranded on a desert isle, I don’t know how long we would last. Luckily, I married a man who is handy, but he has the unfortunate habit of whining whenever I come up with an idea for a project.

On the same day that we roasted the crackers, I told him that the time had come for him to make me a new container for the clothespins. The old bag was so torn that it wouldn’t be long before it would rip from its hanger and spill the clothespins on the ground. I had tried patching the bag with duct tape, a Mainer’s first line of defense when things fall apart, but that bag had defied duct tape and had continued to rip. We needed to proceed to Plan B.

I spied an empty laundry detergent jug and said to Clif, “If the top were cut off, two little holes could be punched in the side, and we could recycle the metal hanger from the old clothespin bag. Then, voilà, we would have a new clothespin container made from things we have on hand.” I handed him the jug and the old clothespin bag.

“Why does it always have to be me?” he whined, true to form.

“Here’s how it works,” I briskly reminded him. “I’m the idea person. You’re the handy one. You should be proud that you have these skills. You would not die if you were stranded on a desert isle.”

“Right,” he muttered, but he took the jug and the old clothespin hanger and made me a new container. Total time for this project? Ten minutes, max.

To say that I was thrilled with the results is an understatement. I was so pleased with the way the container turned out that I had Clif take a picture of it hanging on our line. Now, even though we are family with a modest income, we could have sprung for a new clothespin bag, just as we could have driven to Hannaford for another box of crackers.

But that was not the point. With both the crackers and the clothespin container, we used what we had on hand, and it gave me a great feeling to have done so. No new resources were required, yet we had what we needed in the end.

And the colorful afghan hanging next to our nifty new clothespin container? Made for me by my grandmother many years ago, when I was a teenager. Over and over, it has been washed and used, but this sturdy afghan looks nearly as good as it did when my grandmother gave it to me. My kind of afghan.