Throughout the summer months the fruits of my husband's endless artistic and craftsman talents have had of necessity to go into hiding. Coloured glass has many properties, one of which is the conveyance of heat. Beautiful to look at, dazzling in fact at times of various light conditions, but in summer heat stained glass has the potential if there is enough of it in critical areas to really heat up the interior of a home.

So, during the summer months, our windows which are festooned with stained glass murals that my husband designed over the years and created and put in place long ago, have to be modestly covered. Not that fainter tones of their colours don't show through, since there are sheers pulled over them, but their glory is certainly obscured. But it does the trick in stopping the heat from the sun entering the house.

We may not miss those bright and cheerful windows since they're mostly landscapes and throughout the summer months our gardens bear so many colourful flowers they more than make up for the visual loss of the glass landscapes. On the other hand the purpose of the glass landscapes is to replace the winter-lost gardens throughout months so frigid and snow-covered that little of colour enhances the outdoors other than a blanket of snow, as lovely as that can be.

So now, the sheers have been withdrawn, which is to say pulled back to the sides revealing fully what they've partially covered for months. And the landscapes etched in glass that sustain our aesthetic yearning through November to April are now once again revealed to give us full pleasure at times when pervasive cold and inclement weather conditions leave us vulnerable to pining after the colour of new growth not available for many months to come.