A Third Wall, a First Word: Richford's Library Board Keeps Growing
The community board at Richford Public Library has claimed a third surface near the periodicals shelf. Staff member Colette Aubin-Roy has, for the first time, pinned a reply of her own.
A Third Wall, a First Word: Richford's Library Board Keeps Growing
RICHFORD, Vermont — Nobody planned the third panel. Like the first two, it simply appeared — sheets of paper, a few index cards, someone's handwriting in French, someone else's in English — spreading along the wall near the periodicals shelf at the Richford Public Library sometime in the last week or so. The community board that began as a loose cluster of patron responses to the documentary series Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA has, without any organized effort, outgrown its original two surfaces.
It is a small thing. The library has not announced it, and there is no committee behind it. But for anyone who has watched this particular corner of the building over the past several months, the expansion carries a quiet weight — evidence of something sustaining itself without institutional support.
The more notable development this week arrived in a different key. A patron had addressed a note directly to Colette Aubin-Roy, the library staff member who has functioned as an informal steward of the board — not its author, she has always been careful to say, but its keeper. The note asked whether she planned to attend the dedication of Les Marées / The Tides at Burlington's Central Transit Hub.
On Monday, Aubin-Roy pinned a reply.
It was brief: a few handwritten lines, offered in both French and English, saying that she is thinking about it seriously now — j'y pense sérieusement maintenant. It is the first time she has used the board to say something of her own rather than to arrange or tend to what others have said.
Reached Monday morning, she acknowledged the distinction without dwelling on it. "I didn't overthink it," she said. "Someone asked me something directly, so I answered."
The bilingual phrasing — not unusual in Richford, which sits close enough to the Quebec border that French surfaces naturally in daily life — felt characteristic rather than deliberate. It was simply how she wrote it.
The board continues to receive no official support or oversight, and the library has not announced plans to formalize it. Whether Aubin-Roy makes it to Burlington remains an open question, pinned to a wall near the periodicals.