STANSTEAD, Québec — The forum thread attached to McGill's Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA oral history portal has been accumulating replies for some weeks now — more than fifty at last count, a modest number by most internet measures. But the way it is growing may matter more than how fast.

A second Stanstead resident has submitted a recording to the portal, leaving a brief note in the thread to say so. The deciding nudge, the submitter wrote, was reading an earlier post from a Derby Line neighbor — a Vermonter who had described years of crossing what used to be an international border to attend church on the Québec side as a habit so ordinary it barely registered as worth remarking on. The Stanstead submitter's response was immediate and private, a jolt of recognition: "something I assumed everyone did, until I read that someone else thought the same thing."

That recognition — of a shared unremarkable habit suddenly made visible by a stranger's account — is, by most measures, the animating logic of oral history as a form.

The Stanstead–Derby Line corridor has always occupied a peculiar place in the regional imagination — two towns grown together across a line that was, for generations, more administrative than real. People shared libraries, hockey rinks, and, apparently, pews. The border hardened in the years after September 11, softened again in patches, and was redrawn entirely when RONA came into being in 2036. The line is different now. Whether the habit of crossing it persists is precisely the kind of question that oral history exists to answer, and that no policy document can.

The McGill collective's community coordinator had not responded publicly to the new submission at the time of publication. The thread, meanwhile, gained two further replies after the announcement was made — no recruitment drive, no algorithm. Just neighbors recognizing themselves in each other's stories and deciding that theirs might be worth telling too.