I have never been brilliant with directions, which is why I found myself reversing a hire car down a narrow lane in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, convinced I had missed the turning for Fischerdorf Zirchow. The sat-nav had given up somewhere near Anklam, and my passenger, armed with a printed map that may as well have been written in runes, was no help whatsoever. We had been driving since dawn through flat, frost-bitten countryside, and the late November light was already beginning to fade. There was a moment, just as a tractor appeared in my rear-view mirror, when I wondered if this whole off-season escape had been a terrible mistake.

We found the place eventually, tucked between bare hedgerows and a stand of leafless birch trees. The Fischerdorf itself is a cluster of wooden holiday cottages built in the style of traditional fishing villages, all weatherboard and steep roofs, arranged around a small frozen pond. In summer, I imagine, the place bursts with bicycles and barbecues and the shriek of children leaping into the water. In late November, it was utterly still. Our breath clouded the air as we stepped out of the car, and the only sound was the distant creak of a wind turbine somewhere across the fields.

The key was in a lockbox, which I fumbled with frozen fingers while my companion made a great show of checking the empty birdhouses for signs of life. Inside, the cottage smelled of pine and recent cleaning, and someone had thoughtfully left the heating on low. I immediately cranked it up to something approaching tropical, shedding layers until I stood in a ridiculous combination of thermal socks and a t-shirt, unpacking groceries from the nearest Aldi while my feet thawed against the radiator.

What struck me most that first evening was how the season had stripped everything back to essentials. The long windows, which in summer would frame green leaves and busy terraces, now gave onto grey skies and the skeletal outlines of neighbouring roofs. I found myself noticing things I might otherwise have missed: the particular quality of the afternoon light, pale and watery, sliding across the frozen pond; the way smoke rose perfectly vertical from a distant chimney in the windless cold. We cooked a simple supper of sausages and potatoes, because this is the sort of practical, comforting food that demands to be eaten when the temperature hovers around freezing, and we ate in near-silence, exhausted by the journey and the strange, slowed rhythm of the place.

I woke early the next morning, confused by the darkness, and stood at the kitchen window with a mug of tea that cooled too quickly. The pond had acquired a skin of patterned ice overnight, and a heron stood motionless at its edge, apparently unconcerned by the human presence. I watched it for perhaps twenty minutes, until the grey dawn gradually separated sky from land and the bird lifted away on slow, deliberate wings. There was something almost meditative about this waiting, this willingness to observe without expectation, that I suspect the summer crowds would never permit themselves.

The cold had driven us inward, certainly, but it had also opened something up. Without the distraction of swimming or sunbathing or any of the usual holiday performances, we were left with the basic fact of the place: its quiet, its modest beauty, its stubborn persistence through the dying months of the year. I thought about my frantic reversing down that lane, my panic at the fading light, and smiled at my own ridiculous urgency. The season had its own pace, and it was teaching me, slowly, to match it.