Falmouth resident and grade school art teacher Karyn H. Phares paints bright red plump hearts on various sized rocks and under the cover of night places them around town. It started at the beginning of the pandemic as a way to bring joy, especially during a time of uncertainty and adversity. She began by painting hearts on rocks and leaving them in her front yard in North Falmouth for passersby to take or simply admire. She also delivers the rocks to locations around Falmouth and has enlisted her family to help.
A year later, over 700 rocks have been distributed around town and also now sit in public locations such as Main Streetâs Peg Noonan Park, near the Falmouth Village Green, in front of the high school, Mullen-Hall and Lawrence schools. There is a tree stump near the entrance of the Main Street branch of the post office adorned with a large heart, as well.
One year later, social media show us that fear and phobia are still with us.
A woman who has been renting a house in East Falmouth with her family told her flight-from-New York City COVID story. This woman, who asked to remain anonymous, did not initially heed the urging of her parents, who are off-Cape Massachusetts residents, to leave Manhattan and come to the Bay state.
When schools shut down and people were asked to work remotely, however, the family left the city on March 19 (she remembers that it was the vernal equinox) and came to an Airbnb in East Falmouth. Having spent a week every summer on the Upper Cape, she knew the area and felt that Falmouth would be a good place to hunker down for a few weeks.