RICHFORD, Vermont — The first of three corkboard panels was mounted on the north wall of the Richford Public Library on Tuesday afternoon. Two additional panels are expected later in the week, pending delivery of hardware.

Colette Aubin-Roy, a library staff member, said the staff had been deliberate about keeping the original community notices in place throughout the installation — pinned around the new mounting hardware rather than cleared away and replaced. The wall, which had served as an informal overflow surface for some time, is now being formalized.

Most of what is pinned there is routine: ride-share requests, a lost cat notice, an announcement about a seed swap in April. Scattered among them are the bilingual exchanges that accumulated over the past year or so — short, handwritten notes in English and French, some responding to one another, some standing alone. They were not organized. No one appears to have planned for them to remain.

They remained.

Aubin-Roy said the carpenter paused before packing his tools to read the wall a second time. He told her it "reads differently once you've put something permanent behind it."

The Richford Public Library board approved the installation at its February meeting. The carpenter is based in the Northeast Kingdom.