A woman’s remembers when her mother bought a teacup in 1939. It is a thin teacup of a pale-green color with the word “Czechoslovakia” stamped on the bottom. Most importantly, there are flowers decorated the bottom of the cup that she refers to throughout her conversations with her mother.  The daughter spends most of her time thinking about the past and recalls the times her mother said something to her as if giving a final farewell, “the first of all the goodbyes mothers say to their daughters.” One instance is when her mother tells her that family is the most important thing in the world. The other is when she witnessed her father hugging her mother from behind and her mother shaking him off saying that she was busy. She remembers how also in 1939, her mother was a bride, and asks about her mothers’s past. Yet her mother always seems to evade her questions, giving little information that rarely amount to a full life story.  She looks at the teacup and thinks about how it was created in a country that “lost its absorption in peaceful work.” Years later, she visits her mother who tells her to focus on the future knowing her daughter’s tendency to focus on the past. The daughter thinks about World War II that had just recently ended and all the women who must have faced the terror of falling bombs in the sky, and imagines them holding their own flowers like the ones in the teacup.  She talks more with her mother about marriage and the future. She circles back to the teacup in her thoughts, wondering about how souvenirs get handed down and help write history by prompting people to think about the past.