Local preschool teacher, author and artist Debra Norton died unexpectedly of heart failure on July 15 at her son’s home in Lisbon Falls. Her children and colleagues remember her as an imaginative and compassionate educator with a unique ability to connect with kids.
Norton, 64, was born in Bath in 1960 and lived most of her life at her family home on Eggemoggin Way on Harpswell’s Sebascodegan Island. Since 2011, she taught at what is now the Harpswell Nature School in Harpswell Center, where she engaged hundreds of children with her curiosity and creativity.
Her family and close friends spread some of her ashes in Harpswell at a location she loved to visit. Afterward, a larger gathering of friends, colleagues and former students celebrated her life on the Brunswick Town Mall.
Norton’s colleagues at the Harpswell Nature School marveled at her. “She spread art around like glitter,” said Elise DeRosa, her co-teacher for the last three years.
“She could find salamanders under any stump or rock,” said Lauren Akeley-Taylor, the current director of the school.
“She’d bring in a bag of black beans and say, ‘We’re going to throw them everywhere and watch them sprout,'” DeRosa said. They did.
“She was always open to being surprised. She always felt there was something else we might discover about a child that might not fit with our preconceived notions,” said Myrna Koonce, the former director of the Nature School who hired Norton in 2011.
Norton’s daughter, Jessiemarie Duplessis, said her mom would plan a curriculum for each season, but would just as easily abandon it if it wasn’t grabbing the kids’ interest.
One class liked space, so she incorporated space themes all year long. That included building a rocket ship from materials they found and writing a letter about it to NASA — to which the space agency replied.
For preschooler Emmer Webster this past year, it was pirates. The class learned the names of every part of a ship, and they learned what pirates did and didn’t do — the latter including brushing their teeth and eating enough fruits and vegetables.
Norton would hide gold-painted trinkets around the playground for Emmer. And Emmer remembers that Norton woke him up early from nap one day so he could be the first to know the class was taking a field trip to Bath to see the ship Virginia.
DeRosa saw Norton’s teaching style as an extension of her deeply held beliefs.
“At her core, she was a real humanitarian and cared deeply about our community and our nation,” she said. Norton’s most important principle was to treat others as you would want to be treated.
Duplessis, her daughter, said, “I think Harpswell Nursery School aligned the most with how she loved to teach kids but also just be with kids.”
Caleb Streadwick-Grant, Norton’s son, said the preschool was like a second home for his mother.
Motherhood was transformative for Norton, according to her daughter.
“I think when I was born it answered something that she wanted,” said Duplessis, her first child. She said that even though life treated Norton to a fair share of hardship and neglect, “it never made her hardened. If anything, it broke her open and made her softer.” She seemed to embrace motherhood as a way of life, treating every child like her own.
Along with that came an acute sense of perception. “Deb was a person who really saw you,” DeRosa said. “She saw you and she saw the world around you.”
Duplessis is Norton’s daughter from her first marriage. After her divorce, Norton returned home to Harpswell, where a letter from an old summer flame found her. A Christmastime visit turned into a second marriage, in Montana. When that ended, she came back to Harpswell again, this time with Streadwick-Grant, her ex-husband’s son.
One of his early memories of her is from a whitewater rafting trip in Montana. He tipped over the side into the cold, churning water. Just as suddenly, Norton grabbed him and put him back in the raft, “like a goddamn superhero,” he said.
This past Christmas, Streadwick-Grant learned that his mother had never legally adopted him. They went to the courthouse together to have it made official. That same week, she saw him get married.
Norton made candles, jewelry and art from sea glass, mica, driftwood and anything else she found. She painted watercolors, or painted a seascape on her shirt to cover a stain.
Her friend Debbie Brisbois said she wishes she had saved the many handmade cards Norton sent her for holidays or the changing seasons. She still has a sketch of a rhododendron in bloom that Norton made at Brisbois’ house one day.
Norton made two significant pieces of art late in her life: her fantasy books, “Dingley Island: The Story So Far” and “The Daughters of Veah.”
Norton was always a storyteller. She would make up stories for her children, and for her students at school. Norton told the Anchor in 2024 that she had started writing the stories in 2006. In 2019, Duplessis said, “She gave herself permission to be a writer.”
The books are set in a fictionalized version of Harpswell, and reflect her deep love for this place. Pammy’s Ice Cream Parlor, The Holbrook Store, and other real-life locations — some of them places Norton herself worked at different times — have counterparts in her novels. Her characters marvel at tall pines and the rocky seashore. The books delve deeply into the bonds of family, the beauty of the natural world, and magic.
Friends said Norton was working on or had finished a third novel in that series, as well as a children’s book. Her kids are trying to find them among her files.
Magic was a recurring theme in Norton’s life. Spells, wizards and fairies appear in her books. She spent her last night with Streadwick-Grant, rewatching an old family favorite called “The 10th Kingdom,” a 2000 miniseries that imagines visiting a parallel world where fairy tales are real.
She was also keenly aware of another sort of magic. “She was really good at seeing magic everywhere,” Duplessis said. A bee crawling into a flower, the sound of laughter — “The small details of life delighted her.”
