The drive down to Etaules started well enough, which should have been my first warning. I'd packed the car with the smug efficiency of someone who'd watched one too many YouTube videos about "holiday hacks," and by the time we hit the autoroute south of Nantes I was already picturing myself as one of those effortless travellers who arrive looking fresh and continental. That fantasy lasted until I realised, somewhere near La Rochelle, that I'd left my entire washbag on the kitchen table in Leeds. There is a particular flavour of middle-aged panic that comes from knowing you are heading to a self-catering property with no shampoo, no toothbrush, and a partner who finds this significantly funnier than the situation warrants.

We arrived in late September, that awkward shoulder season when summer has technically finished but refuses to hand over the keys properly. The Poitou-Charentes light at that time of year has a filtered, honeyed quality, as though someone has stretched gauze across the sky. The gite sat at the end of a narrow lane, surrounded by vines that were heavy with the last push of ripening before harvest. I could smell the salt from the estuary on the breeze, mixed with something greener, something that made me think of tomatoes still clinging to dying vines in nearby potagers.

The key was exactly where the property notes said it would be, which felt like a small miracle given my track record that day. I fumbled it into the lock while my partner photographed my increasingly desperate attempts to make the mechanism turn. "For posterity," she said, though I suspect the folder on her phone is simply labelled "your incompetence."

Stepping inside, the first thing that struck me was the temperature. September in this part of France builds up a warmth in stone walls that it releases slowly, grudgingly, like someone who doesn't want the evening to end. The rooms smelled of that particular stillness you only find in properties that have sat empty for a few days, a faint mineral scent that I have come to associate with the start of proper holidays. I opened the shutters in the living room and the late afternoon light flooded in, catching dust motes and making the tiled floor glow with the residual heat of months of sun.

I had planned to make a grand gesture of opening a bottle of local wine on the terrace, perhaps with some cheese I'd imagined buying from a charming fromager. Instead, we spent that first hour in a reconnaissance mission to find a supermarket still open, because my washbag situation had become urgent and because I had also, it emerged, failed to pack any teabags. The French do many things magnificently, but their supermarket opening hours in September still catch me out, operating on a schedule that seems designed to remind foreigners that they are, in fact, foreign.

We found a Carrefour on the edge of nearby Marennes, open by some miracle, and I stood in the aisle of dental products with the intense focus of someone defusing a bomb. My partner had wandered off to look at the wine selection, because some priorities remain constant regardless of seasonal transitions.

Back at the gite, the evening had cooled dramatically, as September evenings do here, pulling the warmth out of the air with surprising speed. I built a fire in the wood-burner with the enthusiasm of someone who has rarely built fires and has certainly never built one well. It smoked. It smouldered. Eventually it caught, and I sat in front of it with a sense of achievement entirely disproportionate to the actual accomplishment.

What I remember most about that first evening was the particular quality of the darkness outside. Away from Leeds streetlights, with the vines stripped of their daytime industry and the estuary invisible but present, the night felt expansive, patient, waiting. The crickets were still going, though with less conviction than they would have managed in August. There was a sense of things winding down, of the year tipping gently towards its closing movements, and I felt oddly grateful to be there for that transition rather than for the full heat of summer.

I fell asleep that night with the taste of supermarket wine and the smell of woodsmoke in my hair, already less bothered about the washbag, already settling into the slower rhythm that this season in this place seemed to offer so readily.