December 21st, 6:10 AM, the morning after the first real snow, and I could not find it. I walked the block twice. What I eventually recognized was not the basket but the mitten, a small rose smudge on a white field, and I went to that, and the basket was underneath it.
The ninth station shows what snow does, which is to volunteer as contents. The frame of the basket is still legible: two long walls and a rim, holding a rectangle of untouched white as neatly as a picture frame holds a picture. One whole panel has cracked off, fallen outward, and now leans against the drift on the left. The blue cord is frozen into a corner fragment and binds it to nothing. A single dead leaf sits in the middle of the snow inside, the last of the five from the eighth station, and I checked. Above the drift the road is black and wet and unplowed, and the streetlamp lays its long orange stripe straight down the middle of it toward the viewer. Caravaggio never painted snow. I have decided this was an omission rather than a limitation, and that he would have understood immediately what snow is for, which is to show you the shape of the thing it lands on.
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