This chair’s metal frame is frozen, as it is now in the depth of a Sierra winter. Little icicles hang down from it toward the icy deck it sits on. Winter’s white blanket of snow piles high around, covering the nearby picnic tables.
Later in the year, we will sit at those tables with our guests and eat from the barbecued meats and sweet corn we will lovingly cook.
In the matter of a very few months, this chair will have its colorfully striped cushion and its laughing occupants restored. This very chair.
But not today. Today, the weather keeps us inside by the fire, warm and happy.
The chair waits patiently for its time.
Speaking Plainly 
Dream on, friend. Someone, a philosopher like you, I expect, said he didn’t know if he was a man dreaming he was a wooden chair with a metal frame, or whether he was a wooden chair dreaming he was a man. Or something.
If the metal in the chair, possibly originating in China, doesn’t rust meantime, it’ll be there in a few months possibly for you to sit in.
Beyond, the trees naturally attuned to the weather and living, are waiting patiently to offer their shade to you and guests, assuming they haven’t been sold to a lumber company for paper making.
Dream on, friend.
Thanks, Chris. I’m confident I’ll find shade from the trees when I need it. They’re old and good friends.