About Me...

My name is Laura Lane. I run a small but stubbornly successful cleaning company and, when I’m not elbow-deep in someone else’s dust, I spend quiet times at home or out walking my dogs in the neighborhood, by the creek or in the nearby park. I live on Rambling Trail in Shady Acres — a street that looks like any middle-class street in suburbia and populated by a novel’s worth of characters.
I started this blog because I needed a place to empty my head. You know the kind of quiet that’s not really quiet at all? The hum of traffic on Broadway, dogs that bark at nothing, a creek that talks to itself at night — those are the backbeats of my days. I keep notes. I have a habit of jotting down odd little things: there was a man who drives his boat around the block, a neighbor who wore a top hat and screamed at the moon, a woman who kept calling people for sport. Little details. Little people. Little mysteries.
I don’t expect anyone to read this. That makes writing it safe — an honest ledger of the ridiculous and the worrisome. But secrets rarely stay small in Shady Acres. They tend to curl into bigger problems and then, if you’re unlucky (or maybe just honest), into full-on disasters.
This series—Suburbia Unfiltered—will be a diary, an investigation, and a string of stories stitched together. Some will be small: a missing cat, a feud over a fence. Some will creep toward something darker: disappearances, threats, and an old hurt that refuses to heal. I see things because of my work. I’m the invisible cleaner who sits on porches, empties the trash, hears arguments in empty houses, and finds the crumbs people leave behind. I’m also a daughter, a mother, someone with an old house and an older mother living in an attached apartment. I’m the kind of person who remembers what people forget.
There are names you’ll meet here: Karen and Sterling (a young couple who made half the neighborhood miserable), my ex-husband Chase (complicated, sometimes dangerous), Kelli (someone I loved once, who became a problem), the Rambling Trail regulars — Marlene, Paula, Rick and Denise — and a dozen more people whose lives bump against mine like shopping carts. Some of them are kind. Some of them are cruel. All are human.
And then there is a question that will keep pulling at me: what happened to Karen and Sterling? One day their furniture was gone, their laundry gone, their children missing from the block for months. I don't have any answers yet but I’m starting this blog to keep a record — and because once you notice how many small things line up into a pattern, you can’t unknow it.
If you like a slow, quiet unravel — picture tea on the porch, a creek just a block away, and a neighborly book club that talks gossip like scripture — but with the occasional scream across the hedges, then you’re in the right place.
This will be weekly. Sometimes it will be petty. Sometimes it will be grim. I will be honest, and probably too blunt. I hope that what starts here as a way to process my days might also help me (and maybe you) understand how a small, ordinary place can hold extraordinary secrets.
— Laura