I have never been so grateful for a sat nav in my entire life, and I say that as someone who once followed one into a canal car park in Norfolk. The drive from Graz airport to Vordernberg in mid-October was supposed to take fifty minutes. It took us an hour and a half, and that was entirely down to my stubborn refusal to believe that a road marked "seasonal use only" on a weather-beaten sign actually meant me. The first flakes of snow had fallen two days earlier, you see, and what looked like a charming shortcut on the map turned out to be a track better suited to mountain goats with four-wheel drive. We reversed three hundred metres in a rental Fiat Panda while my partner, Sarah, made that particular face she reserves for my navigational optimism.

By the time we reached the holiday home, the light was doing that extraordinary thing it does in Styria at this time of year, slanting low through the pines and turning everything golden and slightly unreal. The house sat at the edge of Vordernberg village, a solid wooden building with a balcony that looked directly up toward the Pfaffenstein. What struck me first was the smell, that particular cold-weather combination of wood smoke and damp earth and something faintly metallic from the old mining country all around. I stood there with our bags at my feet, breathing it in, while Sarah went to find the key safe and promptly dropped the code in a puddle that was only partly frozen. October in the mountains, we were learning, keeps you alert.

The interior was warm in a way that central heating never quite manages. The owners had left the underfloor heating on low for our arrival, and the wooden walls seemed to hold the warmth like something precious. I noticed the details that only make sense in autumn: the boot dryer in the utility room, the stack of firewood already laid by the stove, the thick curtains that would matter more with each passing week. On the kitchen table sat a bottle of pumpkin seed oil, that deep green Styrian speciality, with a note wishing us a good stay and warning that the morning frost was coming earlier now.

I poured us both a glass of the Zweigelt we had picked up in Leoben, and we took them onto that balcony as the last light failed. The cold came up through the soles of my shoes immediately, that particular October cold that is not yet winter but has stopped pretending to be summer. Somewhere in the valley below, a dog barked, and the sound carried with a clarity that only happens when the air has thinned and sharpened with the changing season. Sarah pointed out that I was shivering visibly and had been for several minutes. I had not noticed. There is something about arrival, about the exhaustion of travel and the sudden stillness of being somewhere new, that makes you slightly stupid. I was wearing a thin jumper and no socks, standing in mountain air that was probably four degrees, convinced I was comfortable.

We lasted perhaps ten minutes before retreating to light the stove. The wood caught slowly, which the instructions had warned us about, being properly seasoned for winter burning rather than quick summer flames. I found myself oddly moved by this, by the thoughtfulness of preparation for a season that was still technically weeks away by the calendar but already present in every practical detail of the house. The autumn had shaped everything here, from the closed shutters on the neighbouring houses, many already empty until the ski season, to the particular silence of a village that has accepted its transition from summer walking destination to winter sports outpost and is simply waiting now, patient and prepared.

I fell asleep that night to the sound of wind moving through the spruce trees, that rushing sound that is not quite like anything else, and woke to frost patterns on the inside of the bedroom window that I photographed like a tourist, which of course I was. Sarah laughed at me. I did not care. The season had made its claim on the place, and on me, and I was happy to surrender to it.