A Richford Patron Wrote Back — in Both Languages

RICHFORD, Vermont — When the offline media card came back to the front desk at the Richford Community Library last week, it came with something extra: a folded sheet of notepaper, covered on both sides in small, careful handwriting — some of it in French, some of it in English, switching back and forth between episodes.

The card held the first three episodes of Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA, the documentary series the library has been lending in physical format for patrons without reliable broadband. The borrower, who asked to remain anonymous, had written a brief response to each episode. Not one language and then the other. Both, together, as the thoughts seemed to come.

Colette Aubin-Roy, the library staff member who received the return, said she held the note for a moment before she knew what to do with it.

"It wasn't a complaint, and it wasn't a rave," she said. "It was just someone thinking out loud, in whatever words fit best. That's Richford, isn't it — "

With the borrower's permission, Aubin-Roy pinned the note to the library's community board — the same board that has been accumulating responses to the documentary series since the cards began circulating in February. Most comments so far have come in person, at the desk or in the stacks, a word or two while a patron is already on the way out the door. This is the first time someone has written anything down and left it behind.

"I think of it as a continuation of the conversation the board has been having with itself," Aubin-Roy said. "Because that's what it felt like. It was already in dialogue with what was up there."

Richford sits at the former Quebec border, and the town has been working through what integration means in practical, daily terms — who speaks what to whom, which signage gets updated first, whether the French Mass at Saint John's gets listed in the English bulletin or the other way around. These are not large questions in the national sense. They are large in the way that all local questions are large: immediate, unpostponable, lived.

The community board at the library has no official standing. It is a corkboard near the periodicals, and what goes on it goes on it because someone decided it belonged there. Aubin-Roy said the note belongs there.

The library's remaining cards for Episodes One through Three are currently on loan. A waiting list for Episodes Four and Five, which arrived last month, has eight names on it. The library board is scheduled to discuss the lending program as part of its late-April review.