Time & Perspective Quote by Donald G. Mitchell

Mitchell’s line is a quiet act of calendar sabotage: he rejects the official math of the year (January’s austerity, winter’s bookkeeping) and replaces it with a sensual, optimistic metric. “Count time from spring to spring” isn’t just a preference for pleasant weather; it’s a statement about what deserves to be treated as real. The year, he suggests, shouldn’t be organized around scarcity and damage (“blight”) but around renewal (“blossoms”). That contrast does the heavy lifting: blossoms are temporary, fragile, and recurring, which makes them a better symbol for how happiness actually arrives - not as a permanent state, but as a season you can prepare for and recognize when it returns.

The subtext is moral as much as aesthetic. “Reckon” and “count” sound practical, almost clerical, as if cheerfulness is a legitimate accounting method rather than a guilty indulgence. Mitchell, writing in a 19th-century American world still shaped by agrarian rhythms and Protestant seriousness, is nudging against a culture that often treated pleasure as suspect and hardship as virtuous. He’s not denying blight exists; he’s refusing to let it be the organizing principle.

It works because it takes something as neutral as timekeeping and reveals it as ideology. How you measure the year becomes how you measure a life: by what wounded you, or by what reopened.