RICHFORD, Vt. — Colette Aubin-Roy was not keeping track. She had opened the library the way she opens it most Thursday mornings — lights on, kettle on, a quick pass through the reading room — when a patron stopped her near the south-facing corkboard and asked, simply, how many notes were up there now.

She counted. Then she counted the other two panels.

"Just over forty," she said Thursday, describing the tally with the mild precision of someone reporting a weather reading. "I hadn't thought to ask myself until she did."

The three permanent corkboards at the Richford Public Library have been a fixture of the front reading room for some years, used in the way community boards tend to be used: lost cats, firewood for sale, the occasional hand-lettered opinion. At some point — Aubin-Roy cannot say exactly when — the notes began to speak to one another. A comment about road conditions drew a reply. A reply drew a reply to that. Some exchanges now span two or three separate cards tacked across different panels, connected by nothing more formal than proximity and a reader's attention.

Of the forty-odd notes Aubin-Roy counted Thursday, at least six originated from outside Richford. She recognized the handwriting on a few from Stanstead, across the border in what is now the RONAn principality of lower Quebec. There were one or two from Montreal — she knew because the contributors had said so, or because she had recognized them from previous visits. One note carried no identifying detail at all.

"That one's been up for almost two weeks," she said. "Nobody's claimed it. Nobody's taken it down."

Aubin-Roy said she has not announced the count to library administration or posted anything about it. She does not plan to. "It's the kind of number that only matters if you were here for the first one," she said.

The Richford Public Library is open Tuesday through Saturday. The corkboards are near the front window, to the left as you come in.