"What to say?" and "Why Now?"

Last night we attended my daughter's preschool picnic. At the event we ran into someone my husband used to work with, but whom he hadn't seen in at least a couple of years. He asked us how we were doing...I for one didn't know what to say. I think I said we were fine or some other benign answer. This brings up the difficult question that I have had to wrestle with, just how much do I tell people and how much do they really want to know? In reality I should have answered, "Gee, actually not so well. We've had the worst year of our lives and are still reeling from the trauma of everything that happened." - But we just can't tell people that, especially if we haven't been in contact and they didn't know my mother personally. I hate being deceptive but at the same time, it really isn't appropriate to spill our tales of woe to someone like that. I hate it though, pretending like nothing unusual has happened in the past year when, in fact, my world was torn apart.

Another incident happened today that left me saying, "why now, God? What sick joke are you playing on me?" For years my mom watched a couple of local roas where small turtles were known to cross, hoping to catch one trying to cross the road so she could rescue it and put it in a tank for my brother as a pet. (Laws in this state prevent buying small turtles by anyone other than those with a scientific affiliation.) She never found a live one. Guess what I found crossing one of those very roads and rescued today...yep, a turtle. He wasn't teeny tiny, but he was small and no, I did not keep him, I merely carried him (or her) to safety. The whole incident had me thinking, "why now?"