When Truro Started A Love Story

14 February, 2025 – CAPE COD, MA – During the pandemic, a Cape Cod love story unfolded in Truro and Provincetown. A heartfelt movement connecting people despite emptied public places. Two friends found themselves documenting this piece of local modern history.

During the pandemic in 2020, a Cape Cod love story unfolded in Truro and Provincetown, a heartfelt movement connecting people despite emptied public places. The two friends and photographers, Suz Karchmer and Rachael Sokolowski found themselves witnessing and documenting this piece of local modern history.

"We started independently both drawn to the fact that something was happening in, specifically, Truro and Provincetown," Suz remembers. "And there were these hearts. And we knew at the beginning it said 'thanks to the essential workers, thanks to the frontline people.'"

It was a reaction to the pandemic and the lockdown, people paying homage to the essential workers keeping society afloat. But soon a chain reaction took off: hearts appeared on walls, on lampposts, outside public buildings, schools, and in restaurant windows.

"You would see, especially the pallets started showing up on Route 6 in Truro. Some were beautifully done, some were slap dash, you know, throw some paint on," Suz says. 

She says some of the hearts were very simple, "just an outline in red on a piece of cardboard leaned up against a telephone pole, or very elaborately sort of constructed, like in that picture, it's up on a telephone pole. That took some effort," Suz says and points to a photography taken by Rachael Sokolowski. A photograph Rachael worked hard for, standing on the highway in the dark, waiting for a car to pass under the telephone pole to capture both the illumined heart someone had attached to the pole, as well as the characteristic red streaks of car lights with low shutter speed.

Remarkably, the hearts were left untouched, some for years, withered, but still standing strong against winter storms and salty humidity. The two photographers, also defying Cape Cod's moody weather, soon had a big collection of documented anonymous hearts. They looked at each other one day and said, "Hey, I wonder if this is something that we shouldn't let go of because it expresses something from an era." And Rachael said to Suz, "Hey, do you wanna do a book?" "And I very naively said, yeah," Suz recalls.

They both knew they had recorded something special. "I'm thinking about it as extraordinary things that were done by ordinary people, right?" Rachael says. "So we have this like mass amount of community that came together and connected in a way that they were able to do during a time when we couldn't be socially together."

Suz and Rachel started looking for the anonymous heart creators, to interview for the book and a documentary Suz started making. "We were able to talk to the two school teachers in Truro that created the ones that went outside of the Truro Central School," Rachael says. "Why did they make the hearts? Because they wanted to connect with the kids. The kids couldn't go to school and they wanted to put the hearts out there, with different messages on the school sign every day, so that there was this human connection that they were unable to have in the classroom."

The exhibit Take Heart – A Cape Cod Love Story will be at the Brewster Ladies Library until February 27th, when it will move to the Provincetown Commons.

"We have found that when the show is opened to people and they come in, they don't know what to expect," Suz says. "And one person said, a friend of ours, 'I had not realized how much I had shut down my emotions during the pandemic to feel the loneliness less.' Because this is a collective of all those emotions. It represents different times, different places. And we've had people break out in tears when they see it."

Whatever the future for the hearts movement is, Rachael and Suz will be there to document it once again. "Where it'll end. I don't know. The future's uncertain, right?" Rachael says. "Will more hearts come out? Will there be something else that will create this community response? We don't know, but if it happens, we'll be there to continue on."

A time of much uncertainty reminded us how much we need each other. People in Truro and Provincetown took heart to withstand a storm blowing so hard that a virus traveled around the world, all the way into the heartfelt communities of Cape Cod.