The drive down from Marseille airport had been going suspiciously well until I realised I'd been following the sat nav's cheerful instructions towards La Valette du Var for a good twenty minutes with my rucksack still sitting on the roof of the hire car. There it was, flapping about like a depressed seagull, as I pulled into a petrol station to assess the damage. Miraculously, everything was still attached, though my dignity had definitely blown off somewhere near Toulon.

I arrived at the property in late September, that awkward in-between week when Provence can't quite decide if it's still summer or ready to commit to autumn. The owner, a wiry chap called Philippe, greeted me with the resigned expression of someone who has watched too many British tourists attempt to reverse into his gravel driveway. He needn't have worried. I was too busy staring at the fig tree in the front garden, its branches heavy with fruit that had begun to split and weep with sugary ripeness. The whole place smelled of warm, overripe figs and something else I couldn't place until Philippe pointed to the lavender hedge, still faintly perfumed from its August peak, now going slightly grey and woody at the edges.

The house itself was one of those solid, unhurried Provencal buildings that looks like it has been there since before anyone thought to write things down. Cream walls, green shutters that actually functioned, and a terrace where the afternoon sun pooled in a way that made you want to immediately abandon any plans you'd made. Philippe showed me the outdoor kitchen with its ancient barbecue, explaining that in July this area would be unusable after ten in the morning, the heat bouncing off the stone until even the lizards gave up and hid. But now, in this liminal season, it was perfectly pleasant well into the afternoon, the sun softened just enough to be companionable rather than oppressive.

He left me with a bottle of local rose that he'd clearly been given by someone and was desperate to offload, and I sat on that terrace with my rescued rucksack and my warm wine, watching the light change. The cicadas were still going, but their enthusiasm had waned from the full-throated frenzy of high summer to something more intermittent, almost conversational. A few leaves had started to turn on the plane trees along the lane, though the vineyards on the slopes above the village were still green, the grapes presumably still being persuaded into their final push.

I had planned to drive to the coast that evening, to find some overpriced seafood and watch the sunset. Instead I walked into the village, which took all of twelve minutes, and found the boulangerie still open but running low, the baker apologetic that the tarte tatin was yesterday's. I bought it anyway, along with a baguette that was properly crusty rather than the sad, humid things you get in August when the humidity gets to the dough before the customers do. The village square had that particular September emptiness, the last of the summer visitors gone, the winter routines not yet established. A few locals sat outside the bar, wearing light jackets in that optimistic French way, as if willing the temperature to stay manageable.

Back at the house, I ate my stale tarte tatin on the terrace as the light went properly golden, that specific Provencal golden that seems to happen only in autumn, when the angle is low enough to turn everything slightly honeyed. The swimming pool, which Philippe admitted would be drained within the fortnight, looked almost too blue against the fading garden, the water still warm enough from the accumulated heat of summer that I actually got in, something I never would have attempted in the shock of spring.

Floating there in the cooling evening, listening to the last confused cicadas and watching the first bats appear, I understood something about seasonal travel that had eluded me before. I was always a July person, a peak-season maximalist, convinced that anything less than full sun and full crowds meant you were doing it wrong. But this felt like being let in on a secret, the place showing you its other face, the one it keeps for itself when the tourists have gone and the light has shifted and even the figs are too tired to hold themselves together properly.

I stayed in that pool until my fingers wrinkled and the sky turned that particular deep blue that happens before proper dark, and I thought about my rucksack on the roof, and how sometimes the mishaps are what let you notice the things you were too busy to see.