Coop foot is what happens when you live in a house with twenty-two people, three cats, three chickens, and occasionally a dog that we bring home. And you never fucking wear shoes and you walk in the dirt and walk around outside and you jump on the trampoline and then your feet are just black – blacker than the lungs of the people who sit on the porch all the time smoking cigarettes. And you track that shit everywhere and the floor never gets cleaned, so it just builds and builds and builds and it’s beautiful.

Coop Foot, also know as Co-op Foot, is a term my informant told me is used by the people who live in her house; she learned it from multiple people, not just one. She told me about this term on her front porch while she at the time had ‘a mild case of coop foot.’ It falls under a collective running joke among the house members concerning how filthy their house is. If someone takes a shower and then walks around downstairs for even just ten minutes, she says their feet get impossibly dirty. However, she used the term affectionately and had a poetic description for it. It sounded as though she had a sense of pride about it, probably because it’s something she and her housemates have bonded over.