The ferry from Ystad was barely out of the harbour when I realised I'd left my phone charger plugged into the socket at the terminal cafe. Typical. By the time we docked at Ronne, my battery sat at a cheerful four percent, and I had precisely zero idea how to reach the Sandkas beyond a hastily screenshotted map and a prayer.

I found the cottage by following a man with an enormous cabbage in his bicycle basket. He turned down a lane near Balka Strand, and I thought, well, when in Bornholm. The Sandkas sat tucked among pines, all weathered wood and sensible Danish practicality, with a terrace that looked like it had witnessed several decades of contemplative smoking.

My first proper conversation came from Ulf, the neighbour, who appeared over the fence while I was wrestling a particularly aggressive window latch. He wore sandals with socks and carried a mug that said "World's Okayest Grandfather." Without introduction, he informed me that the previous guest had been a poet from Odense who'd wept at the sunset every evening for a fortnight. "Very tiring for the rest of us," Ulf said, sipping something that smelled strongly of liquorice. "We started drawing curtains."

He helped me with the latch, which apparently required a specific prayer and a twist to the left. Then he introduced me to his wife, Birgit, who emerged from their cottage bearing leftover rugbrod and a suspicion that I might be another weeping poet. I assured her my emotional range rarely extended beyond mild confusion. She seemed disappointed.

The owner, a woman called Mette with paint permanently flecked across her forearms, arrived the next morning to explain the wood-burning stove. She spoke in rapid Danish before catching my expression and switching to English that was frankly better than mine. The stove, she explained, had moods. "Some days it wants to be your friend. Other days, it hates you personally." She demonstrated the proper arrangement of birch logs with the reverence of a priest handling communion wine, then admitted she'd once spent three hours in this very cottage arguing with it during a storm. "We made peace eventually. It is like marriage."

At the village shop, barely more than a shed with excellent lighting, I encountered an elderly man called Erik who insisted on explaining the entire history of Bornholm's smokehouses while I attempted to buy milk. His grandfather had built one in 1923. His father had improved it. Erik himself had "mostly stood nearby and looked useful." He sold me something called sol over Gudhjem with such intensity that I felt rude refusing, despite having no immediate plans for raw egg yolk on herring.

That evening, Ulf reappeared with two beers and a folding chair. We sat on my terrace watching the light fade over the Baltic, and he told me about his forty years as a carpenter in Copenhagen before Birgit dragged him back to her grandmother's island. "I thought I would miss the noise," he said. "Turns out I was just tired." He left me the chair, which I later discovered he'd built himself, slightly wonky and completely perfect.

By the third morning, I'd abandoned any pretence of efficiency. I chatted with the woman at the bakery about her daughter's disappointing boyfriend. I helped Erik carry boxes to his smokehouse and earned a lecture on proper herring preparation that I will never use but will never forget. I even learned the window latch's actual name, which Ulf had invented himself and which translates roughly to "the stubborn bastard."

The Sandkas itself became merely the setting, lovely and creaking and full of borrowed folding chairs. What stayed was the peculiar generosity of people who have time, who treat strangers as inevitable neighbours, who build slightly wonky furniture and name their household fittings. I left my charger behind again, deliberately this time, as an excuse to return. Ulf has promised to teach me the stove's proper prayers, and Birgit still suspects I might weep at sunsets given sufficient encouragement.