I have never been so grateful for heated seats in my life. The drive from Frankfurt Airport to Kirchheim in Hesse was only meant to take an hour, but my sat-nav decided to have what I can only describe as an existential crisis somewhere near Hanau. One moment I was cruising down the A3, the next I was navigating a farm track that looked like it had last seen a wheeled vehicle during the Napoleonic Wars. My hire car, a sensible Volkswagen that I had promised to treat with respect, developed a concerning rattle and an even more concerning smell of burning clutch. By the time I limped into Kirchheim, the February afternoon was already fading into that particular grey-brown gloom that Hesse wears so well in late winter.

The holiday home sat at the edge of the village, a solid timber-framed affair that looked like it had been built by someone who deeply mistrusted the concept of straight lines. Snow lay in dirty heaps along the driveway, the kind that has been ploughed aside and left to fossilise for weeks. I grabbed my suitcase from the boot, stepped onto what I assumed was a path, and immediately sank to my knee in a drift that had been artfully concealed by darkness. My left welly filled with freezing water. My right one stayed on the path, which would have been fine except my foot was no longer in it. I hopped about for a moment, a one-legged flamingo in a puffer jacket, before abandoning dignity entirely and crawling the last three metres to the front door on hands and one remaining foot.

The key was in a lockbox, which my frozen fingers eventually opened after what felt like a Morse code recital. Inside, the house smelled of pine and something else, something warm and slightly sweet that I later identified as the underfloor heating doing its noble work. I stood in the hallway, dripping onto the tiles, and felt the season shift from enemy to accomplice. The cold that had been bullying me since Frankfurt began to retreat from my extremities in stages, like a tide going out.

Every window framed the same muted palette: bare branches, slate-coloured sky, the distant suggestion of hills that I knew from my research were the Vogelsberg but which currently looked like smudged charcoal. This was not the Germany of postcards. There were no fairy lights, no snow-dusted evergreens looking picturesque. This was honest, unvarnished late winter, the part that tourism brochures tactfully skip over. And standing there in my single welly, I found myself unexpectedly moved by it.

The kitchen had been stocked by the owners with the kind of thoughtfulness that makes you feel slightly guilty about your own hospitality. Local apple juice, dense and cloudy. Bread from a bakery in nearby Alsfeld, still faintly warm. A note explaining that the heating was on a timer and that I should not, under any circumstances, attempt to adjust the boiler myself, written in the emphatic capitals of someone who has learned this lesson through bitter experience. I made tea with water that tasted of the region's volcanic mineral springs, something I would not have noticed in summer but which announced itself boldly now, when every sense felt heightened by the contrast with the cold outside.

By evening I had located my missing welly, retrieved from the drift with a broom handle and some creative language. I sat in the living room as darkness settled properly, the sort of complete rural darkness that city dwellers forget exists. The heating clicked and ticked. Somewhere outside, an animal moved through the garden, leaving tracks that would be frozen by morning into tiny sculptures of its passage. I had come to Hesse expecting to endure February, to grit my teeth through the last grey weeks before spring. Instead I found myself settling into the season like something that had been waiting to hibernate, grateful for the excuse to move slowly, to notice the particular quality of light that comes when the sun hangs low and reluctant, to appreciate a house that seemed built precisely for this time of year, when warmth and shelter become virtues you can feel in your bones.

The sat-nav never recovered, incidentally. I left it in the car, muttering to itself about alternative routes, and walked to the village bakery the next morning through frost that crunched with the satisfying sound of a well-made biscuit. My welly leaked slightly. I did not mind at all.