No one writes songs about November. It is largely an unloved month, dark and cold, a time to put away our summer postcards and prepare for the heavy weather to come.

Certainly, no one in Connecticut seems to be in a songwriting mood this autumn. As I write these words in mid-October, the governor and state legislators still have not resolved their differences in a budget-making process that began in January. What's more, whatever sensible, civilized debate ever existed between the Democrats and Republicans has long since devolved into an ugly, petty and ultimately unproductive game of back-and-forth blame. Their posturing, and their reluctance to address the fundamental issues that plague state government, are quickly draining whatever reservoir of goodwill still exists among voters.

Meanwhile, Republican hopefuls have begun circling around the wounded Sen. Christopher Dodd for the election looming next year. Among them are two wealthy political dilettantes, one, pro wrestling maharani Linda McMahon, whose most notable moment to date seems to have involved kicking a man in the groin in the center of a ring before a large crowd of people, and another, economist Peter Schiff, who recently likened his putative campaign to the Allies battle against Hitler and Nazi Germany.

It's all enough to make you want to run and hide, but instead we'll turn to the healing balm of Thanksgiving and the remarkable messages written to commemorate that holiday by Wilbur Cross, Connecticut's governor from 1931 to 1939. Cross was a politician, of course, and no doubt dealt with, and dished out, his share of vitriol. But he was a poet, too. His language was learned, eloquent and eccentrically self-assured, and it rose above the concerns of the day to speak of larger things-of hope and of gratitude for the ample gifts of nature and civilization and life itself. In 1938, with the Depression lingering and war clouds billowing overseas, with Connecticut in a state of anxiety and uncertainty, Cross's Thanksgiving Proclamation found and struck the chord that abides deep within us all:

As the colors of autumn stream down the wind, scarlet in sumach and maple, spun gold in the birches, a splendor of smoldering fire in the oaks along the hill, and the last leaves flutter away, and dusk falls briefly about the worker bringing in from the field a late load of its fruit, and Arcturus is lost to sight and Orion swings upward that great sun upon his shoulder, we are stirred once more to ponder the Infinite Goodness that has set apart for us, in all this moving mystery of creation, a time of living and a home.

In such a spirit I call upon the people to acknowledge heartily, in friendly gathering and house of prayer, the increase of the season nearing now its close: the harvest of the earth, the yield of patient mind and faithful hand, that has kept us fed and clothed and has made for us a shelter even against the storm. It is right that we whose arc of sky has been darkened by no war hawk, who have been forced by no man to stand and speak when to speak was to choose between death and life, should give thanks for the further mercies we have enjoyed, beyond desert or estimation, of Justice, Freedom, Loving-kindness, Peace-resolving, and let no occasion go by without some effort worthy in a way however humble of those proudest among man's ideals, which burn, though it may be like candles fitfully in our gusty world, with a light so clear we name its source Divine.

Perhaps there are songs of November after all.