Shoes off! Please

Last night I was reading Ali Wong’s book Dear Girls and bumped up against a cultural habit that I have struggled with for most of my dual American/Canadian life; the removal of shoes upon entering the house.

Wong, who is an outrageously funny stand-up comic, wrote that she preferred to date Asian men for many reasons, one being that she didn’t have to act as a tour guide through Asian culture for them. Dating white men in America, she said, always meant working through a few simple etiquette lessons including taking off your shoes when entering a home.

If she was dating Canadians, I don’t think she would’ve encountered this problem.

I grew up in Nova Scotia and we always took our shoes off when entering the house; there is often a whole room just for this purpose called the porch or mud room, depending on the season/family culture.

But I noticed early on that my American relatives didn’t take their shoes off in the house; not in their homes in America and not while visiting our homes in Canada.

My first thought about this cross-border, cultural contrast was that perhaps it was a division between town and country. I grew up on a small farm and nobody wanted to track the barn into the house. But on second thought, some of my American relatives had farms; they didn’t track farm crap through the house, but when wearing everyday shoes, they’d leave them on indoors.

Next I considered that it might just be a Maritime thing—but no. I have lived in four provinces and everyone seems to follow the unspoken shoes off rule.

I should be clear, if footwear is visibly muddy, full of snow or clearly going to make a mess of the floors; my observation of Americans indicates that they pretty much all remove footwear inside the home. But it’s the walking on the street, clean looking soles of sneakers that don’t require removal in America.

But the truth is, those shoes aren’t clean. You’ve walked where animals have answered the call of nature, where garbage has leaked onto sidewalks, and where car exhaust leaves the surrounding surfaces awash with toxins; and then you bring it into your house.

A research paper published in The Journal of Applied Microbiology in 2016, found that “shoe soles are a vector for infectious pathogens; Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, Clostridium difficile and multidrug-resistant Gram negative species” and that no effective decontamination strategy for shoe soles was known.

So, at a time when everyone is thinking about self-isolation strategies to avoid COVID-19, give a thought to what you do with your feet when you walk in the door after a tiring day of bulk buying hand sanitizer and face masks. Take your shoes off, find some cozy slippers and know you have done all you can to avoid getting sick from the world outside your door.