Every few

months, I get the urge to organize.

Usually this inner voice

gets silenced pretty quickly after shuffling some papers

around and folding a load of clean clothes, but this time

I am driven to become ultimately organized.

I have always been a

failure at putting things away. "A place for

everything, and everything in its place," has always

struck me as a sick joke. I live for the thrill of the

hunt. "Where are my keys?" "Where is my

left shoe?" "Where did I leave the car?"

My ever-clever children

have devised countless ways to help their absent-minded

mom to keep track of her personal belongings, but I have

succeeded in failing every attempt. There's the time

Robert attached my pager to my key ring so I could phone

up my keys and follow the beeps to their hiding place. It

worked like a charm until the batteries died.

My mother came up with a

remarkably simple plan to keep my shoes paired and handy

- just line them up in pairs against the wall in the

hall. She forgot about Nick the dog who decided he liked

Cole-Hahn leather better than rawhide chews.

David has become my

household detective. He has an uncanny knack for sniffing

out the most difficult-to-find items. Sunglasses?

"They're in the bathroom, Mom." Dish detergent?

"In the garage, Mom." And that pesky bag of dog

food. "In the white chair on the porch, Mom."

Thank God I only lost him

once - in Macy's.

My current plan involves a

ridiculously easy system of chucking things into empty

liquor boxes. With the holiday weekend upon us, package

stores were stacked to the max with empty crates, perfect

for holding junk. Boxes are labeled in sets of three

- magazines, books and everything else.

In less than an hour, I had

filled enough boxes to create a dividing wall in the

family room. To organize bills to be paid, I bought an

accordion-pleated file with numbers 1-30, designating the

day of the month the payment is due. Number one is packed

- from last month's bills.

Compartment-styled boxes

for holding earrings, etc, are piled in my bedroom

waiting to be filled. The over-the-door videocassette

holder is still in my car from the day I found it for a

dollar at a yard sale.

I decided my only way out

of this mess is to just give up and build an addition to

the rear of the house, just for living. The rest of the

house can be for storage. I'll just label the rooms,

magazines, books and everything else.

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