“The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere.Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s treat;The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay,And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.”— William Cullen Bryant (179401878)With all due respect to the 19th-century American poet, although “the autumn leaves lie dead,” I, for one, don’t consider autumn as “the saddest of the year” with its “melancholy days.”At least, not in these parts of the United States in California where, for the most part in early October, the sizzling summer can’t seem to make up its mind when it should let go and let the more mellow fall envelope the valley with its cooler clime, be it wet, windy or dusty from all the almond-harvesting activity.But there was a time when I thought autumn was a melancholy time, too. That is, until a chance conversation with Karen Widmer when she told me that fall is her favorite time of the year. “I love fall!” she said, her eyes shining.Karen is the granddaughter of George and Violet Perry and the daughter of Art and Diane Perry of the family business, George Perry & Sons in Manteca.