For eight years, every Mother’s Day began with the same Taobao florist shop in my mother’s city.

No matter where I was living, I opened the app, searched the same store name, and ordered a bouquet to the same place. Sometimes I was twelve hours behind. Sometimes fifteen. Sometimes it was still the previous day where I lived while Mother’s Day had already started at home.

The chat history with the florist looked almost identical every year.

“Please deliver before Mother’s Day.”

“And please include a card.”

Occasionally I asked for lighter wrapping paper, or lilies instead of roses, but otherwise the messages barely changed. The owner always replied with short confirmations of the address and smiley face emojis.

My sister always assumed I must have bought the flowers in the United States and shipped them home. What convinced them most was the card. The handwriting on the small cream-colored paper looked enough like mine that nobody questioned it.

The florist copied my message carefully onto the card before delivery. By what felt like a remarkable coincidence I still cannot explain, the handwriting looked remarkably similar to mine.

Under the glass surface of our dining table at home, my mother still keeps several handwritten essays I wrote in junior high school. The pages have been there for years, flattened beneath bowls, plates, and cups of tea. My handwriting at the time was unusually neat. I was particularly good at calligraphy.

After nearly ten years away from home, I can still type Chinese quickly, but writing it by hand feels unfamiliar. I hesitate over characters I once wrote automatically, and many now come out wrong.

If I wrote the Mother’s Day cards myself now, they would not resemble the handwriting my family remembers.

In previous years, I copied elaborate Mother’s Day messages from the internet before sending them to the florist. Long paragraphs about gratitude, sacrifice, and time.

This year, the message I sent was much shorter.

“Eat more meat. Sleep well. Laugh more.”

The florist copied the sentence onto the card in careful handwriting.

I do not know who writes the cards or where exactly the florist shop is located in the city. I only know that every year, before Mother’s Day, someone copies my words by hand onto cream-colored paper and sends flowers to my mother’s place.

I hope the business continues to do well.