A chore is no burden when it happens in a different location, and with love

If you were counting on me for anything this week, there’s a good chance you’ll hear from from one of my friends or coworkers who stepped up on little notice to carry some of my load for a bit.

People have been happy to help me since they found out I was going to have to leave town for an important trip. I’d be leaving a long list of to-dos that others would have to add to their own work, but they knew I wasn’t dropping my responsibilities just to lounge around on a relaxing vacation. I was about to take on more work, actually, flying out to keep my parents’ household running smoothly while my mom breaks in a new knee.

So don’t tell anyone back home that this is turning out to be one of the best vacations ever.

Sure, my days are full of chores from the time I get up until I turn out the light at night, just like I told everyone who’s seeing to my usual responsibilities. But there’s a funny thing about chores: All it takes to turn them into a good time is to drop them into a different context.

This week, that means I’m having a blast cooking and cleaning full time, with an errand mixed in here and there for a change of pace. I don’t get to see my folks often, so I’m hardly noticing the work this week because it’s such a treat to be hanging out with them while I do it.

And all this is happening in the house where, when I was growing up, I avoided so much as straightening my own room with such stubbornness that everyone from cousins to my own sweet mom regularly swapped my name for a Spanish version of “lazy guy” that’s too colorfully vulgar for a family newspaper.

It’s a good thing that follow-up care for my mom’s knee surgery includes frequent phone calls and visits from clinicians. If the shock of seeing her formerly lazy son working around the house without complaint gives her a heart attack, there’s a good chance we’ll have a medical professional around who knows what to do about it.

I shouldn’t be surprised how much fun housework is when it’s not in my own house. My favorite getaway is a camping trip, after all, and camping isn’t much more than housework with a lot of extra steps.

While you’re unlikely to ever find me doing yardwork, cleaning or laundry in town without an audiobook to keep my mind from going numb, you’ll rarely see me happier than than the moment I drop my backpack in the woods to do essentially the same jobs far from civilization.

Ordinarily, there’s nothing fun about laundry even when the effort pays off. But one of my favorite memories is scrubbing trail-filthy clothes on a washboard in a tiny creek and then rigging a clothesline in a clearing where fog rolled in so thickly that nothing dried. I remember thinking in the middle of the job about how my grandparents would shake their heads if they’d known how much trouble I’d gone through just for a taste of their rough lives.

All of which brings me to a solution I may have for Mark Zuckerberg, who the business pages report has been having trouble figuring out how to make money since he turned Facebook into a company focused on virtual reality.

I’ve put on one of his company’s virtual reality headsets to see what the big attraction was, and I did indeed have a good time playing one of the popular games it runs. It’s a frenetic affair where you slash cubes with a saber in each hand and duck obstacles while dancing to thumping music the whole time.

As fun as it is, there’s nothing to show for the effort once you switch off the headset.

The virtual reality that Mr. Zuckerberg needs to get his engineers working on is something that just changes the scenery around all the chores that you need to get done every day. I don’t need a saber in each hand, just a virtual forest to surround me and my laundry basket, or a videocall with my folks that make it look like I’m straightening their living room instead of my own. Something that puts the work of everyday responsibilities in a new context.

Give me a call if you’re reading this, Mark. Hashing out the details will be a good time. Just don’t tell the folks who are covering for me back home.

Richard Espinoza is a former editor of the Johnson County Neighborhood News. You can reach him at respinozakc@yahoo.com. And follow him on Twitter at @respinozakc.

This story was originally published November 16, 2022 at 8:00 AM with the headline "A chore is no burden when it happens in a different location, and with love."