RICHFORD, Vermont — The community board at the Richford Public Library has, for as long as anyone can remember, been a place for lost-cat notices, canning workshops, and the occasional handwritten opinion about road maintenance on Route 105. It has not, historically, been the subject of international attention.

That changed this week, at least in a small way, when the student collective behind Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA — a bilingual podcast produced out of McGill University in Montreal that has quietly built a following among people interested in what RONAn identity actually feels like from the inside — posted three sentences to their listener forum naming the Richford Public Library directly. The collective described notes left by patrons on the library's community board as "something we did not expect and cannot quite explain."

Three sentences. The collective did not elaborate.

"We saw it," said Marguerite Fontaine, who volunteers at the library two afternoons a week and has worked the front desk there off and on for nearly a decade. "Someone printed it out and pinned it to the board, which I thought was funny. A note about the board, on the board."

She paused.

"I don't know what we did, exactly. People leave notes. That's what the board is for."

That understated reaction seems about right for Richford, a border community of a few thousand people in the northern reaches of the Vermont principality, where Quebec is close enough that some residents cross into it in their daily routines without thinking much about it. The town sits at the kind of edge that has always made border communities feel like a category unto themselves — neither fully one thing nor the other, which may be precisely what the Nous Sommes RONA collective found interesting.

The podcast, now in its second season, has been traveling the RONAn principalities conducting long-form interviews about what it means to live inside this still-young nation. Its geographic range has been modest — mostly Montreal, Burlington, Portland — but the Richford thread on its listener forum drew enough engagement that the collective flagged the town for a visit. In a separate production update posted this week, the collective confirmed that pre-production logistics for a late-April interview in Richford are on track, with travel and recording arrangements being finalized. No interview subjects have been publicly confirmed.

That announcement, too, landed quietly in town.

"I heard they're coming," said one patron reached outside the library Thursday afternoon, who declined to give his name. "Good. We've got things to say." He did not specify what things.

Library staff say they have not been contacted directly by the collective and are not planning any special arrangements. The community board, for its part, continues to function as normal. As of Thursday it held two notices about a missing tortoiseshell cat named Clementine, a flyer for a seed swap at the Enosburg grange hall, and a hand-lettered reminder that the library's snowshoe loan program ends March 31.

What the collective makes of any of that will presumably become clear in April.