Just north of Lake George, at the southern end of Lake Champlain, a small cable-guided ferry carries travelers between Ticonderoga, New York, and Shoreham, Vermont. I walk my bike onto the platform, and as we glide across the lake, the densely wooded New York shoreline gives way to Vermont pastures. It’s perfect for my ride, if you don’t mind the occasional waft of cow manure. I’m lucky I brought cash, as the ferry doesn’t accept cards or, as the captain says, “anything by phone.”
On the other side, I find Norton Latourelle.
Norton has made a career out of being discovered by accident. I found the 77-year-old folk artist after pedaling past his roadside gallery. I stopped to chat, and he invited me inside to see his carvings of dogs, birds, insects, livestock and all kinds of local wildlife. Decades earlier, a New York gallery owner happened to drive by while Norton was working outside with a chainsaw. That chance encounter eventually led to Norton’s work being displayed on Madison Avenue.
Norton, who still has a full head of enviably thick, boisterous curls, has been carving animals his whole life, a skill he inherited from his woodworking father. In 1991, he and his wife, Marlene, established their gallery in Vermont. They were a partnership: she ran the business and he made the art.
“She knew how to use the computer, and she knew how to talk to people,” Norton says. “And I knew how to make stuff.”
Norton was preparing to retire when Marlene was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. At the time, it was a word they struggled even to pronounce. Norton became her caregiver and learned firsthand how devastating the disease can be for both patients and their families. Marlene died in March 2025.
That’s when he created “Marlene’s Cardinals,” a charity project that sells Norton’s simple, hand-carved red cardinals in her memory, with proceeds helping glioblastoma patients and supporting research into the disease that killed her.
The idea for the cardinal, however, was something Norton and Marlene developed together years earlier, and its origin was far less sentimental.
Norton had scraps of pine left over from carving dogs and needed something inexpensive to sell to visitors who couldn’t afford a $400 sculpture. He and Marlene kept writing “pet rock” on their business planning list: shorthand for their version of a cheap, irresistible souvenir.
“We needed something small,” Norton says.
The cardinals worked, but not quite in the way they expected.
“We weren’t selling one cardinal to one person,” he says. “We were selling five cardinals to one person.”
Norton started asking why. Customers told him they associated cardinals with loved ones who had died, seeing the birds as visitors or messengers from another world.
“If they lost their father, and there were five siblings,” Norton explains, “one way of comforting and bringing all five siblings together is giving them each a cardinal, so that their father could be with them in their yard.”
After Marlene’s death, Norton shifted his focus almost entirely to the birds. He has made thousands, each cut from pine and finished with five coats of red paint. A local sawmill donates the wood.
The cardinal project is now approaching its initial goal of raising $100,000. The money supports glioblastoma patients and their caregivers at the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington, and Norton hopes the effort can eventually help support research and clinical trials.
For months, Norton has been telling people that cardinals can be messengers from lost loved ones. So, I ask him whether he actually believes it.
“If I can indulge you a little bit,” he says, “I have a story of my own that makes me kind of cry when I think of it.”
Last January, Norton was eating lunch with a man helping him install a new bandsaw, the tool he uses to cut his cardinals, when a bird appeared outside the window.
Norton knows birds, but he had never seen one like this before. It was deep blue and larger than an indigo bunting. After some research, he identified it as a blue grosbeak, an unusual visitor to Vermont. Then he learned something else: despite its name, the blue grosbeak belongs to Cardinalidae or the “cardinal family.”
“So now I’ve got a cardinal visiting me,” Norton says. “I have a bird never seen before by me, a blue grosbeak, landing and meeting me and saying, ‘Hello.’”
“You ask me if I believe it. I’m not sure I do, but I do now… There was no reason in the world for that bird to come by.
You can find Norton’s work at nortonsgallery.com or better yet, ride past his workshop at 51 Route 73, West Shoreham, Vermont. If you’re lucky like me, you may find him outside working.
Ben Fishel is a communications professional and editorial cartoonist living in Washington, D.C.
