I have never been so grateful for a sat nav in my entire life, and I have never wanted to throw one out of a moving car quite so much either. The journey to Domfront en Champagne was supposed to take four hours from Caen, where we had caught the ferry from Portsmouth. Six and a half hours later, we were still circling what I can only describe as the most aggressively identical-looking farmland in northern France. The mishap, because there is always one with us, came when I confidently declared I knew a shortcut. My partner, who has learned to fear these words, simply gripped the door handle and stared out at the endless fields of sugar beet. The shortcut took us down a track that grew progressively narrower, progressively muddier, and progressively more inhabited by cows who seemed personally offended by our presence. We emerged eventually, covered in the kind of stress sweat that no amount of Breton cider will immediately fix, onto a proper road that the sat nav actually recognised. I did not mention the shortcut again. I did not need to. The look said everything.

We arrived at the property in late October, when the Pays de la Loire was doing that thing where autumn pretends to be summer for a few glorious afternoons before remembering its obligations. The light was extraordinary, all low and golden, stretching across the garden and making the stone walls of the cottage look like they had been painted by someone who really understood warmth. The air smelled of woodsmoke from a neighbour's chimney and damp leaves and something else I could not place, something green and fading. It was the smell of a season turning, I suppose, and it hit me the moment I stepped out of the car. I stood there like an idiot, inhaling dramatically, while my partner unloaded the bags with the particular silence that means I will be hearing about the shortcut for the remainder of our natural lives.

The cottage itself was bigger than I expected, with that slightly awkward layout that old French properties always seem to have, where you climb three steps to get to a bedroom that is somehow both enormous and impossible to navigate in the dark without bruising your shin. But the heating worked, which in late October is not guaranteed in rural France, and the kitchen had a proper range that made the whole ground floor smell of warm iron and old cooking. We arrived at that perfect time of day, around four in the afternoon, when you still have enough light to explore but enough chill in the air to make the prospect of staying in feel genuinely appealing.

I walked around the garden while my partner made tea with the kind of precision that only follows a successful revenge unpacking. The grass was still green but getting that slightly defeated look, and there were apples on the ground from a tree I later learned had been abandoned to its own devices years ago. I kicked one accidentally and a small cloud of wasps rose up, drunk on fermentation, too late in the year to be threatening but still dramatic enough to make me retreat with what I told myself was dignity. The hedgerows were full of blackberries, the last stragglers, and I ate one without thinking and spent the next ten minutes picking seeds from my teeth and reflecting, with the kind of gentle self-awareness that autumn seems to encourage, on how I am someone who never learns from experience but remains faintly proud of this fact.

That evening we walked to the village, barely ten minutes, and found the boulangerie still open, which felt like a minor miracle at that hour in that season. The woman behind the counter spoke to me slowly and clearly, as one might address a child or a very stupid dog, and I understood about half of it and nodded at all of it. We bought a baguette that was still warm and a tarte tatin that we ate with our fingers in the garden, wearing coats against the chill, watching the light fade from gold to grey to that particular deep blue that only happens in October. The stars came out with a clarity that surprised me, the sky having none of summer's hazy generosity, and I found myself thinking that arriving in a place at the moment of its transition, when it is neither one thing nor another, gives you a peculiar kind of attention. You notice more. You forgive more. You do not, apparently, learn to avoid shortcuts or fermented blackberries, but you notice that you do not learn, and in noticing, there is something like peace.