Richford's Library Board Fills Quietly Ahead of 'We Are RONA' Interview Week
Handwritten notes from Richford residents have been appearing on the Richford Public Library's community board ahead of the McGill collective's late-April interview window. Library staff member Colette Aubin-Roy says she hasn't organized any of it — and doesn't plan to.
RICHFORD, Vermont — The community notice board at the Richford Public Library has been getting a little fuller each week.
Three new handwritten additions appeared there this week, according to library staff member Colette Aubin-Roy, who noticed them Friday afternoon. Two were in French. One was bilingual. None was addressed to anyone in particular.
They are part of what has become a quiet, unplanned response to the Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA documentary process, led by the McGill collective, whose late-April interview window is now only weeks away. Richford — a border town that lived through the integration years up close — has found its own way to mark the occasion.
"I've made no effort to organize it," Aubin-Roy said. "And I'm not going to. It's the most honest thing on the wall."
She said the notes have not followed any particular prompt. Some reflect on what the integration years felt like. Some don't say much at all. The board, she noted, was already in place before anyone from the collective came to town.
Richford sits just south of the former Quebec border and was among the first Vermont communities to feel the practical weight of integration after 2036 — in schools, in shops, in the language on street signs. What that felt like from the inside, residents are still working out, a few lines at a time, in pen, on a corkboard in a library.
Episode Six of the Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA series is expected to focus on border communities.