It's sort of funny how something you never once needed is the very thing you now can't do without.

Sometimes it's fun to turn the clock back for a short time (camping), and sometimes it's just not.

The wife and I recently had the opportunity to relive some early days-though not by choice-when the clothes dryer died.

Let me come clean: it wasn't lent out for some other family to have warm and fuzzy feelings to tumble around. After some 13 years, the charity auction purchase finished its last round.

Oh, it continued to hum right along, but it wouldn't dry clothes-and that is the bottom line, no matter how good the tune.

I know, what civilized human being functions without a drier? Well, a young couple, once upon a time did when they first moved to their country cottage.

Back in those days, we learned how to make do, utilizing a string line behind the garage for warmer, drier days and, in winter, an indoor rolling hanger system, a shower rod or just about any place we could find where clothes could hang and dry.

We never gave such inconveniences much thought back then.

That was the way it was, of course, B.C., or Before Child. You can cut corners and make do without a lot before children start going through neatly folded stacks of clothes. (And, let's admit it, a dryer is a heck of nice convenience to have.)

As my mind wafts back to such times, we used to make do without a lot of things, come to think of it. A dishwasher once wholly involved a bottle of liquid detergent and a pair of hands, central air was a fan and open windows and we were quite satisfied with a 19-inch color TV. (Yes, I said color. We're not that old).

No one had HD TVs in those days and we didn't know what we weren't missing because we'd never seen one. Now, folks set huge, wonderful old-style televisions next to the dumpster, begging people to take them. That is truly a line once crossed, no one wants to return.

Yet, I suppose if we had to do without such things again we could. That's one of the great traits of humanity: the ability to adapt.

That having been said, I surely wouldn't want to have to adapt to a life without tennis shoes, eye glasses, elevators for ten story buildings, automobiles, spell check, digital cameras, motorized lawn mowers, microwaves, refrigerators, air conditioning, padded pews, digital recorders and, yes, even computers (though they can be a real headache when they crash).

Granted, not all of these things came along after me, but think about how difficult the task would be to cut grass without a lawn mower.

We made do without the dryer for a couple of weeks, which helped create a little bit of a laundry logjam. When we did break down and buy a dryer, the first one came DOA, adding more to the dirty laundry stack.

I suppose we could have hung that up, too, to diminish the pile, but that would have taken up more space. Besides, no one really wants to air their dirty laundry.