It was a moment that passed almost unnoticed.

The evening meal had been the usual post-Thanksgiving holiday dinner, served from a kitchen table with the diners filling their plates and then seating themselves throughout the kitchen and living room, using every available seating place to eat and visit. Once done, family adjourned to their different homes and guest rooms, to reconvene for cards later that night a mile or so away at the family homestead.

A late-night session of six-handed 13-point Pitch ensued, with the spare members sitting around to kibbitz, or waiting to take their turn at playing cards or, more importantly, restraining the Boston from her search and destroy mission to find and kill the trespassing pug, who was tiredly trying to find a lap or table to sleep on.

Included at the table was the eldest granddaughter, a college sophomore still in the process of learning to live in an apartment by herself. And trying to acquire the basic rudiments of a household. This evening would find her leaving with a surplus plant table, and one other item.

Sometime after midnight, about mid-way through the card-playing session, when someone else was shuffling and dealing, her grandmother left the table and returned with a book. An aged, red-and-white checked loose-leaf cookbook. Another donation to the new home. The young woman leafed through the yellowed pages, a few hand marked with recipe changes or additions, and with an occasional clipping of another recipe or two of interest. And then it was time for bidding, and the card game resumed.

In the end, six games were played, a few quite long because of risky bids and uncooperative cards. The men won four, the women two. Sometime between one-thirty and two in the morning, the games ended and the visiting family members began to gather their things for the drive home. And the grandmother leaned across the corner of the table, gently touching the arm of her eldest granddaughter.

"They gave that to us 54 years ago," she said, nodding towards the red and white cookbook, nestled in the crook of the younger woman's arm.

"For our wedding."

The young woman's eyes widened, and then she pressed the cookbook close to her breast. And there it stayed, even as the winter coats were donned against the non-existant winter chill, as the plant table was loaded into the SUV, and the goodnight hugs given.

A family heirloom, passed to a new generation.

Almost unnoticed.