RICHFORD, Vermont — The note was brief, bilingual, and to the point.

Sometime Monday morning, before the Richford Public Library opened its doors, a patron slipped a handwritten message onto the community board — the same wall that has been slowly filling with notes, reflections, and responses from local residents since the documentary series Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA began airing earlier this year. The note asked, in both French and English, whether the board should be formally preserved rather than taken down once Episode Six brings the series to a close.

Library staff member Colette Aubin-Roy found it when she came in to open up.

"It's the most direct anyone has put it," Aubin-Roy said Monday afternoon, standing near the periodicals shelf where the note now sits — pinned to the third surface, beside an earlier patron message that raised much the same question, less plainly. "People have been hinting at it for weeks. Someone finally just wrote it down."

The wall itself grew without a plan. As the documentary series — a six-part production tracing everyday RONAn life in the years since independence — drew viewers in Richford and across the principality, patrons began leaving messages. Some were personal. Some were political in the small, ordinary way that community boards tend to be. A few were in French, a few more in English, and several moved between both within the same sentence, as Richford often does.

No one designated it for that purpose. It accumulated its own weight over time.

Aubin-Roy says she intends to raise the question at the library board of trustees' next scheduled meeting. She was careful to note that the decision is not hers to make. "I'm staff. I can surface it. That's what I'm going to do." She added that she expects the board will want to hear from patrons before deciding anything.

What "preserving" the board would look like in practice remains unclear. Options might include photographing and archiving the notes digitally, mounting a selection as a permanent display, or simply leaving the physical board in place for an extended period. None of that is on the table formally — not yet.

The timing is not incidental. Episode Six of Nous Sommes RONA has not yet aired, but its release is expected within the coming weeks, and with it the natural endpoint of the arc that drew so many patrons to leave messages in the first place. Once the series concludes, the practical pressure to act — or not — with the wall will become real.

The Richford Public Library board of trustees meets monthly. The date of the next meeting was not available by press time.