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Idiom: The wolf is at the door
It’s a feeling perhaps a majority of people have had at least once in their lives.
There’s an unexpected illness, natural disaster or the primary breadwinner loses their job, but the bills keep coming.
You can rob Peter to pay Paul for a while, but eventually, you’ll fall behind in your payments, and before you can say, Jack Robinson, the wolf is at the door howling for blood. Your blood.
The wolf is at the door means you are facing financial ruin or at least economically challenging times.
In the early 1980s, my family experienced hard times, and the wolf was at the door.
He was on the telephone and in the mailbox too.
When you’re a young kid, you don’t really understand what’s going on with the family finances, but late-night arguments, an empty fridge and lowkey birthdays let you know something is not OK.
The catalyst for all of this was a massive winter sleet storm that knocked out electricity for two weeks and made the roads impassable.
My father missed two weeks of work, which was enough to push us over the edge of the abyss.
Of course, not everyone lost their houses due to the storm, but we did, and so did quite a few others.
You know what I’m talking about if you went through a hard time during the Lehman Shock and the subsequent subprime loan fiasco.
When the wolf is at the door baying for blood, he doesn’t go away until he gets what he wants.
Often, that’s everything you have left.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 72.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.