A Handwritten Note and a Borrowed Card: Richford Finds Itself in 'Nous Sommes RONA'

RICHFORD, Vermont — When the first borrowed copy of Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA came back to the Richford Public Library this week, it wasn't alone. Tucked alongside the offline media card was a handwritten note, brief and unsigned, describing the episode's Vermont farming community segment as "closer to home than I expected."

Library staff member Colette Aubin-Roy said she placed the note near the community board display rather than file it away. "It felt like it belonged out where people could see it," she said. "That's exactly the kind of thing a community board is for." By that same afternoon, one of the two remaining media cards had left in someone else's hands.

The national oral history series, which draws on recorded testimony from RONAns across the principalities and former provinces, has been circulating in Richford through the library's offline media lending program — a practical workaround for residents in areas where broadband remains unreliable. The program requires no account, no sign-in, and no explanation: borrow the card, bring it back.

What the unnamed patron left behind — a few words in ink on a scrap of paper — offers one small measure of how Richford residents are engaging with the larger RONAn story. This is a border town that has watched considerable history reshape itself around its edges; that a segment describing familiar ground prompted someone to reach for a pen is, at minimum, a detail worth noting.