A Note on a Card: Richford's Quiet Conversation with 'Nous Sommes RONA'

RICHFORD, Vermont — The note was not long. A few lines, handwritten, folded once and left with the media card when it was returned to the front desk at Richford Public Library on Friday. Colette Aubin-Roy, the staff member who found it, smoothed it open and read it, then pinned it to the community board beside an earlier message left by the first person to return a card.

The two notes now hang there together, neither signed, both brief. The second one, Aubin-Roy said, described the Vermont farming segments in Episode One of Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA as "hard to explain to someone who wasn't here, but right."

"That's the one that got me," Aubin-Roy said. "Because it's not a review. It's not telling you whether to watch it. It's telling you something about what it felt like to watch it."

The library holds three offline media cards preloaded with the first episode of the documentary series, which has been circulating quietly in rural Vermont communities through a network of library branches. The cards require no internet connection — a practical necessity in parts of Franklin County where connectivity remains uneven — and are loaned the same way a book is: you take one home, you bring it back.

Two cards have now completed that circuit in Richford. The third is still out.

Aubin-Roy has been tracking the circulation the way librarians track everything — with attention to small signs. Two returned cards with notes attached is not a statistic. It is, she suggested, something harder to name: evidence that people are registering something. She said she is considering making additional copies of the card if she can arrange it.

"People don't usually leave notes," she said. "So when they do, you pay attention."

The farming sequences in question document life in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom and Franklin County — fence lines and early morning light, maple operations, the particular silences of working land in winter. For viewers who grew up in these places or still work them, the footage apparently lands differently than it does for outside observers. The second borrower's note does not try to explain that gap. It marks the distance and says: right.

Aubin-Roy placed the second note beside the first and stepped back.

"I want to leave space for the third person," she said. "In case they have something to add."