The sat-nav gave up somewhere between Avignon and sanity, which is how I found myself reversing down a one-lane track bordered by lavender that had no business smelling that good at half past four in a nervous afternoon. I had been aiming for a Paradou, one of those Provencal hamlets that sound like a sigh of relief, and instead I was nose-to-nose with a tractor driven by a man whose expression suggested he'd been waiting his whole life for this moment.

"Monsieur," he said, not getting down, "you are lost in the correct direction." This struck me as profoundly French. He pointed one brown finger toward a stone wall I had mistaken for a ruin, and there it was: the house, all ochre shutters and climbing roses, with a pool that winked blue through a gap in the hedge. I had arrived, more or less.

The key was under a terracotta pot, because of course it was. I spent ten minutes negotiating with the pot, which had developed a meaningful relationship with the soil beneath it, and emerged with a back spasm and a sense of triumph that would prove short-lived. The front door, I discovered, was not the front door. The actual front door was round the side, past a fig tree that dropped fruit with the timing of a comic heckler. I was still laughing at myself when I heard the voice.

"First time?"

She was over the wall before I could answer, which was impressive given she must have been seventy and the wall was not low. Colette, my neighbour for the week, introduced herself by handing me a tomato. It was still warm from the sun, absurdly perfect, and she watched me eat it with the satisfaction of a director reviewing a successful scene. "You English," she said, not unkindly, "you always try the wrong door. It is your nature."

I learned more from Colette in that first hour than I have from some people I've known for years. She had lived in the Paradou since before it was fashionable to holiday in one, back when the baker came by bicycle and the telephone was a shared event at the cafe. She spoke of the village as a person, prone to moods, protective of its own. "The house," she said, nodding at my rental, "it belonged to a painter who only painted the same woman. His wife, fortunately. She is in the mairie now, the paintings, not the wife. The wife is in Marseille, which is better for everyone."

The pool man came the next morning while I was attempting coffee on the terrace, a process complicated by a cafetiere whose plunger had clearly been designed as a philosophical challenge. Didier was sixty, deeply tanned, and spoke of water chemistry with the reverence others reserve for wine. "Your pH," he told me, testing, "it is optimistic. Like your driving, perhaps." He had heard about the tractor. Everyone had heard about the tractor. The Paradou, I was learning, operated on a frequency of gentle surveillance that felt more caring than intrusive.

By day three I had been adopted, or possibly absorbed, into the village's daily rhythm. The baker, Thierry, remembered my order after one visit and began adding an extra pain au chocolat "for the trying" without explanation. An old man at the bar-tabac, whose name I never caught but whose moustache deserved independent recognition, taught me the correct timing for a pastis before noon. "Not before the shadow of the church," he said, which was less helpful than he imagined since the church had no shadow to speak of at that hour in August.

What struck me, and what I keep returning to, was how these encounters accumulated into something like belonging without ever becoming performance. Nobody was playing at village life for my benefit. Colette argued with her husband across the wall about dinner with the casual violence of fifty years' practice. Didier cursed the pool filter in terms that would blister paint. Thierry's wife rolled her eyes when he talked about flour with the intensity others bring to love affairs. They were simply themselves, and I was permitted, temporarily, to be among them.

I left the wrong door unlocked on my final morning, a small offering to whoever came next, and found a tomato on my doorstep where Colette's hands had been. The sat-nav found itself again immediately, as if embarrassed by its earlier behaviour, and I followed the lavender out toward the main road without incident. The tractor man waved from a field. I waved back. We both knew I would try the wrong door again, somewhere, because it is my nature, and because sometimes the wrong door is how you find what you were not looking for.