RICHFORD, Vermont — The note was written in French, on a small rectangle of pale yellow paper, and pinned somewhere near the middle of the board. Colette Aubin-Roy almost missed it.

"I was updating the weekend loan log and I just happened to look up," she said Sunday afternoon, standing behind the circulation desk of the Richford Public Library. "It took me a second to realize it wasn't from anyone local."

It wasn't. The note had been left by a Montreal resident passing through town — the first contribution to the library's Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA community board to come from outside Richford itself. Aubin-Roy does not know the person's name. She did not see them leave it.

The board has been up for several months, a rotating collection of short handwritten notes from library visitors — thoughts on belonging, on language, on what it means to live quietly inside this nation. It began on a single cork panel near the front entrance and has since expanded, notes spilling onto an adjacent stretch of painted drywall when the cork ran out of room.

On Sunday afternoon, a visitor asked Aubin-Roy how long the board had been up. The question made her look more carefully than she had in a while. She counted thirty-two notes, by her reckoning — in English, in French, and in several that move between both languages mid-sentence.

"I hadn't been keeping track," she said. "Thirty just happened while I wasn't looking."

She made no announcement about it. The library stayed quiet, the way small-town libraries tend to on Sunday afternoons — a few people browsing the new arrivals shelf, one child doing homework at the low table near the window.

The Montreal note, she said, feels like something has shifted, even if only slightly. "Richford is a border town. People pass through. It makes sense that eventually someone would stop and add something." She paused. "It's nice that they did."

She did not share what the note said — "it felt like it belonged to whoever wrote it" — but she said it was short, and that it fit.