RICHFORD, Vermont — Colette Aubin-Roy wasn't making an announcement. She was updating the weekend loan log when a Sunday visitor asked how long the community board had been up. She turned to look at it properly for the first time in days — and started counting.

Thirty notes. More than thirty, actually. The overflow had quietly migrated from the original corkboard onto a stretch of painted drywall when the panel filled up, and she hadn't noticed until the question made her look.

"It just sort of happened while I wasn't watching," said Aubin-Roy, a library staff member who has been tending the Richford Public Library's Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA board since it went up. "I hadn't noticed until she asked."

That, she suggested, is probably the point.

The board has drawn contributions in English, French, and bilingual formats from Richford residents since its installation — a grassroots record of what integration has meant to people in this small town near the Quebec border. On Sunday afternoon, Aubin-Roy spotted something new among the folded slips and index cards: a note written entirely in French, from a Montreal resident who had stopped in while passing through.

She did not know the visitor's name. The note, she said, offered none. What it did offer was a line about feeling connected to something the writer hadn't been present for — the integration years, the referendum, the period of uncertainty before RONA's formal recognition. "They weren't here for it," Aubin-Roy said. "But they felt it anyway."

She pinned it alongside the others.

Richford sits a short drive from the border that once divided Vermont from Quebec, a geography that has carried different weight at different moments in recent history. The library board was never intended as a monument. It has no plaque. No formal count is being kept, and no event is planned for when it reaches fifty notes or a hundred. Aubin-Roy said she isn't sure the board even has an official end date.

"People just keep adding to it," she said. "So we keep making room."