Three Threads, One Voice: A Forum Post Finds a Quiet Convergence
A single oral history submission to the 'Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA' project has drawn together Côté-Ouellet's 'Les Marées' mural, the battery pilot land question, and community memory in one reflection. Nobody is calling it a movement. But something is beginning to speak.
Three Threads, One Voice: A Forum Post Finds a Quiet Convergence
UNDERHILL, Vermont — It was a Friday evening forum post, the kind that might easily have been missed. A registered member of the Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA listener community had submitted a brief oral history to the Episode Seven portal, and the collective's community coordinator flagged it with a short note: this was the first submission, she wrote, to treat Daphné Côté-Ouellet's Les Marées mural in Burlington, the ongoing oral history project, and the proposed battery infrastructure in the Stanstead–Derby Line corridor as facets of a single question.
What is the land between communities for?
The three threads have been running in parallel for weeks — the mural with its tidal sweep of imagined borderland; the community memory project gathering voices from the former Quebec–Vermont corridor; the quiet, unresolved matter of which fields and fence lines might anchor a battery pilot program serving both sides of what was once an international boundary. They had not, until now, spoken to each other in any public way.
Colette Aubin-Roy, a library staff member in Richford who has been curating the community board that has quietly accumulated material from all three threads, said she learned of the submission from a patron who spotted the forum post over the weekend.
"I read it twice," she said. She has not yet decided whether to add it to the board.
That restraint is characteristic of Aubin-Roy, and perhaps of the project itself. For now, there is one person's reflection, three things seen together, and the board in Richford, still waiting.