The house on Maple Street is one of the oldest in Willow Creek, and its occupant is the oldest of its kind, too. Lydia Barnes, 82, has lived here her entire life — born in the upstairs bedroom, raised on the stories of her grandfather Josiah, who was master carpenter on the last sloop ever launched from the Thorne & Sons Shipworks.
“I was named for that boat,” she says, settling into a worn armchair by the window. “The Lydia Barnes. Sixty-eight feet, launched in 1882, wrecked off Matinicus in 1896. My grandfather built her. He told my mother, ‘If it’s a girl, name her after the ship. If it’s a boy, well — we’ll figure something out.’”
She laughs at the story, though she has told it dozens of times before — to journalists, to schoolchildren, to visiting historians who make the pilgrimage to Maple Street to hear the town’s living link to the shipbuilding era. She tells the same stories the same way every time, which is not a failing of memory but a careful curation. She knows what matters.
Lydia worked as a bookkeeper for the hardwood mill until it closed in 1972, then for the town assessor’s office until she retired in 2005. She has never married and has no children. The house is filled with evidence of a well-lived single life: a vegetable garden in the backyard (she still cans her own pickles), a walking stick by the door for her daily trip to the general store, and on the mantelpiece, the sepia-toned photograph of the Lydia Barnes under full sail — the only photograph of the ship known to exist.
And then there is the Ice-Out. She has entered every year since 1961 — sixty-four consecutive entries, each one a five-dollar wager on when the ice on Homan’s Pond will give way to spring. She has never won.
“Sixty-four times,” she repeats, as if savoring the number. “You know what the odds are of that? Completely random guessing would have produced a win by now. I’ve got to be doing something wrong.”
Her method is simple: she watches the pond from her kitchen window (she can see a corner of it from Maple Street, though not the buoy) and picks a date in mid-to-late March based on nothing more than “a feeling in my bones.”
“I don’t believe in being scientific about it,” she says. “Amos Homan can have his barometer and his wind readings. Me, I’ve been watching that pond for eighty-two years. I ought to know something by now.”
She has never considered giving up, even as her entries have piled up into a monument of near-misses. “The law of averages has to catch up eventually,” she says. “And if it doesn’t — well, I’ll have died trying. There are worse epitaphs.”