RICHFORD, Vermont — The back-and-forth letters and messages that have been quietly crossing the border between Richford and Stanstead since the launch of the Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA oral history project have now produced something no one in an official capacity planned: a proposal to meet in person.

Colette Aubin-Roy, a staff member at Richford Public Library who has been at the center of much of that correspondence, confirmed Thursday that she received a message from a small group of Stanstead residents proposing an informal gathering at the library sometime in early May.

"It came through just like the rest of the messages — someone wrote to say, wouldn't it be something if we just came," Aubin-Roy said. "And honestly, that felt right to me."

Aubin-Roy said she brought the proposal to the attention of the library board, though she was careful to frame it as something she wanted them to know about rather than a request for sponsorship or institutional commitment. No date has been confirmed, no formal backing has been sought, and the organizers themselves have described the idea simply as "a continuation of the correspondence, but in a room."

"I didn't want the board to hear about it secondhand," Aubin-Roy said. "But this isn't a library program. It's people who found each other through this process wanting to keep talking in person."

The correspondence between Richford and Stanstead residents grew out of the broader Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA oral history effort, which has been collecting accounts from communities across the principality and into the former Quebec territories about what it has meant to become RONAn. Richford sits just south of the old international border — now a principality boundary — and residents on both sides have described a shared sense of history that the oral history process gave them a new language to discuss.

As of Thursday, there is no event to put on a calendar. The proposal remains exactly that — an idea, still in the hands of the people who sent the message and the librarian who received it.