Sue rocks the world with smiles
Across Niagara, her messages of joy are cleverly hidden in plain view.
In the crook of a tree. On top of a boulder. On a park bench. Beside a walking path.
They are placed strategically. Enough out of place to make someone do a double take. Unexpected enough to make someone take notice. And yet, they are meant to be found.
Since last summer, Sue Frail has painted some 200 rocks and, with the help of volunteers, released them into the universe.
Her one objective is simple. “Hopefully, it will get a smile,” she says.
A message on the back directs people to her Facebook page — Rank in Smile Rocks — where they can leave a memory, a thought, a story of someone they know who is a cancer survivor or has died of the disease.
The longtime committee member of the Rankin Cancer Run, she hopes it might draw some attention to an event close to her heart. She’s been part of the run pretty much from the start, organizing a team each year at her workplace, Speciality Print in St. Catharines.
She’s no Picasso. Not even close. Many of her design ideas are realized after an online search of the words “easy painting ideas.” And yet her creations have heart. They come from a place of good intent and a desire to lighten up someone’s day, she says.
“I never do two-of-a-kind,” she says.
She has a team of friends who collect stones and deliver them to her doorstep. Usually, the shape of each stone speaks to her in a way that tells her what she must paint on it.
The possibilities are limitless. An orange-and-white cat on a tall and narrow stone. A grey ostrich with big round eyes on an elongated rock. She’s painted angels, butterflies and flowers. A cow. A pig. And a rattlesnake. She’s even created a self-portrait of sorts — a bluehaired, semi-scary monster holding two coffee cups as a comment on her pre-caffeine mood Monday mornings.
She enlists the help of friends who place the rocks in public places across Niagara. The places are out of the way so people can’t trip on them, or they won’t see the working end of a lawn mower.
When people find one of her rocks, she hopes they are curious enough to pick it up and read the instructions on the back.
They can take a picture and put it back. Pick it up and place it somewhere else for someone else to find. Or keep it.
There was one woman who found one of her rocks in Buffalo. Then she found another on Goat Island in the Niagara River. And then one more in Port Dalhousie.
She’d just like people to post on her Facebook page when they find a rock so she knows where they are in the world. And she’d like them to share a thought. She likes hearing about people. One of the best parts of the Rankin run is meeting people at the registration table the morning of the event, she says.
“You get to hear people’s stories,” she says.
Frail has always liked rocks. As a kid growing up across the border, she loved all the beautiful shapes and colours of rocks. “Every single one of them is different,” she says.
These days, in the backyard garden of her Niagara Falls home, she likely has more rocks than flowers.
Her husband, Chris, is resigned to accept her obsession.
“He knows it’s inevitable,” she says. “He knows when I come home with a bucket that I have more rocks.”
A stockpile is already accumulating in her living room. And as soon a the snow melts for good, she’ll be out with her friends, hiding more.
“Hopefully, it will brighten someone’s day even if it’s just for that moment.”