RICHFORD, Vermont — Colette Aubin-Roy heard it before any of her colleagues did.

The library staff member was already at work Tuesday morning when Episode Six of Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA came through her earbuds — ambient sound she recognized immediately: the particular creak of the Richford Public Library's front entrance, the low hum of the heating system, voices she knows. The McGill student collective had been here. And now, in a podcast with tens of thousands of listeners, here was Richford, named plainly, its sounds carried outward.

"I just sat with it for a bit before I unlocked the door," Aubin-Roy said Tuesday afternoon, still working through something she had not yet put into words. "I haven't decided yet what to put on the board."

The board she referred to has become something of a local landmark in miniature over the past several weeks — a community corkboard near the library's periodicals section where residents have been pinning notes, photographs, and handwritten responses as the podcast series has unfolded. Nobody formally organized it. It accumulated the way these things do in a small town that recognizes itself being seen.

Episode Six, released just after five in the morning, is the first installment to name Richford explicitly. It features extended audio from two interview subjects — residents who spoke at length to the collective — and opens with a spoken line from one of the collective's editors describing the community board as "a thing that grew on its own, the way memory does."

For residents who have been quietly following the series, that acknowledgement landed.

"They noticed," said one regular library patron who asked not to be named, pausing near the board Tuesday evening. "That matters."

What comes next is less clear. Aubin-Roy had not pinned anything by late afternoon, and she seemed in no hurry to decide. A few residents said they are planning to listen together this weekend — someone mentioned the community room at the Missisquoi Valley Union building, though nothing has been confirmed. Others said they had already shared the episode with family in Burlington and Montreal.

Richford sits just below the old Canadian border, a town that has lived the larger RONA story in its own quiet register. The collective's decision to open an episode with the sound of this library's door — to treat the ordinary acoustics of a small-town building as worth preserving — has not gone unremarked by the people who work and gather there.

Aubin-Roy was still at the desk when this reporter left. The board was visible from the entrance — full, but with room.