More than 60 years after they first started selling their bounty at the St. Lawrence Farmers’ Market, Norine and Harlan Clark have yet to miss a single Saturday. But the egg business hasn’t gotten any easier over time. She’s 84; he’s 86. They still use only a single farmhand to tend 1,500 birds at their Port Perry poultry farm—an almost inconsequential number by industry standards. They get up just after midnight on Saturday mornings to arrive at the market and set up in time for the 5 a.m. opening. Eggs, it’s fair to say, are their life. “We haven’t ever had a holiday, really,” Norine says. “You can’t when you have livestock.” And the market’s patrons have become their friends—they’ve been serving some of the same customers for decades. They sell medium, large, extra-large and jumbos in white and brown, plus peewees and smalls when the chickens are young. They don’t do organic or free-range (“The last time we let our chickens outside we came home from market and the foxes had got to some”), but their eggs are light-years fresher than any of the industrially produced ones you’ll find at Loblaws. Norine says she doesn’t know how much longer they’ll go on. Harlan had a second heart attack last March. They scaled their production back by 200 birds this spring. But they’ll keep farming and coming into town each Saturday for as long as they can. “Especially my husband—when we retire, I don’t know what he’ll do. It’ll be a shock for him. We’re so busy here that we don’t have a social life in Port Perry. The market is our social life.”