I stood in the security line at the Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans wondering if I was going to be detained, and taken for dangerous. Hell, I didn’t know, was this something for which I could be arrested? Maybe I should’ve let my brother talk me into sending the glossy, fitted wood box on ahead via mail—though that would have been exorbitant. Plus, I didn’t want to let it out of my hands.

I couldn’t have packed it in checked luggage because it might have been stolen. And who knows? It might have been even more illegal to bundle it away in a packed bag. But I didn’t know about checked bags, since it’s a point of honor going back to boarding school days for me to never have more luggage than I can carry onto the plane, which had led to the spare travel wardrobe of a Greek widow, a succession of black dresses.

I could even feel myself sweating a bit, as I watched the box disappear into the X-ray and I walked barefoot through the scanner. I imagined how the bulky square edges of the box would appear on the monitor, the metal inside in skeletal form.

But not a word from security. There was a small problem with the necklace I was wearing, but that was solved by swinging it behind my neck. I slipped back on my pewter Cole Haan wedges, grabbed my bags, and felt protectively for the heavy tray of sterling silver flatware at the bottom of my suitcase.

The story had started a couple of weeks before, when out of the blue, my older brother texted me on a Saturday from Mississippi: What is Mom’s silver pattern?

Lunt, William and Mary, I wrote back.

Which, if you know it, is a genteel but unassuming pattern, produced 1921-2010, according to information found on Replacements.com. With its simple straight lines with a thin band of chasing (thank you Lesca Black, eighth grade home economics teacher, once again) along the delicate handles, William and Mary is appropriate for the kind of middleclass strivers that my people are—not the typical Mississippi Delta debutante-showoffs with repoussé designs like Francis I, or the Tiffany Chrysanthemum chosen by the Yankee daughters of the 1%.

After a while I heard back from him again: Do you need more? Set at an estate sale for $950.

A few minutes later: Down to $650 but all pieces monogrammed.

Me: A la carte possible? Could use 1 tsp and any/all serving pieces.

Him: No. Then a few minutes later, Looks like he would take $400.

Me: Well, I don’t have that to send right now but if you got it I could send you $100 a month.

Finally: too late it’s sold for $650.

And that was that, until a day or so later when my brother called to tell me that he was the one who had purchased the set—as a gift for me—but hadn’t wanted to write that in a text message.

I was unable to speak when he said this. I do not know how to describe how I felt, other than to say that it felt as though some precious, irreplaceable gift had been given back to me—something that felt close to salvation.

Unearned, unmerited, a gift so unexpected that it struck me, like Zechariah in the face of such news, dumb.

This passage from Jane Kenyon’s poem “Happiness” comes as close to how I felt as anything:

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

So many things, it seemed, were given in this offering: My mother, all the way back from the grave to me; she who could chop wood and wore jeans and loved football, but who had painstakingly identified for my five-year-old self the niceties of having long-handled sterling “iced tea spoons.”

And also my cultural heritage, that Southern thing, of being the kind of person who would actually care about sterling silver and even use it—in an age where people register for wedding presents at Target and Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and the big “gets” are small appliances and thousand-dollar cookware. (Unless they are planning to spam people via email to pay for their indulgent honeymoon.)

I have trod this ground before, I know, but I find that there’s the barest hint of misogyny in the reflexive dismissal of sterling silver by men and women in favor of the ubiquitous choices of giant pottery plates and wrought iron flatware that could be wielded by Fred Flintstone. As if our tableware must be tough and inviolable, and those that are fragile must be worthless.

Then, of course, there are the people who claim the wasteful extravagance of such purported luxuries—certain kinds of plain-type Christians worst of all, quick to cite Acts 7:48, that “the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands.”

But we love through our bodies, what we smell and touch, and I don’t see how that can’t be extended to the love manifested in the settings on a table.

There’s a famous story about Dorothy Day, possibly apocryphal, where she takes an expensive ring that has been given to her ministry and just goes and gives it to a homeless woman to do whatever she wanted with it—a gesture that gets her flack from her colleagues who accuse her of wasting it, and can only see the money that the sold ring would have brought.

You will recall the similarity to Judas’s comment about the jar of spikenard that Mary poured over the Lord’s feet (John 12:1-8).

Dorothy Day is said to have told her detractors, “Do you suppose that God created diamonds only for the rich?”

My table a temple; I lay it out in honor. I touch the soupspoons, the cake server, even the tiny, precious tongs for sugar cubes.