I have never been so happy to see a washing line in my life. After a flight to Preveza, a ferry that I nearly missed because I was too busy eating a lukewarm cheese pie, and a hire car with air conditioning that wheezed like my uncle Terry after Sunday lunch, I finally pulled up outside the cottage in Lazarata. The sat nav had given up three miles back, resigned to its fate somewhere near a goat track, and I had been navigating by instinct and the occasional helpful local waving in vague directions.

The mishap came when I tried to open the boot to grab my suitcase. I pressed the button. Nothing. I pressed it again, more firmly, as if that ever helps. I circled the car, tried the other buttons, even kicked the tyre in a brief moment of travel delirium. It was only when I noticed the key fob still sitting on the passenger seat, visible through the window, that the awful truth dawned. I had locked myself out of a car that was not even mine, in thirty-two degree heat, wearing jeans because I had read somewhere that Greek mosquitoes respect denim. They do not, by the way. They found the gaps.

Forty minutes later, a very patient man from the hire company arrived and liberated my belongings. By then I had made friends with a cat who seemed to find my predicament hilarious, and had developed what I can only describe as an intimate relationship with a fig tree's shade. I finally stumbled through the cottage gate with my case, my dignity in tatters, and a newfound appreciation for people who remember basic life skills.

And then I stopped. Really stopped. The cottage sat there, white walls and terracotta roof, looking thoroughly unbothered by my chaos. A lemon tree dropped scent into the air like it was showing off. The garden sprawled out in that gloriously unmanicured Greek way, herbs growing where they pleased, bougainvillea climbing anything that stayed still long enough. Somewhere beyond the low stone wall, I could hear a donkey making its opinions known, which I decided to interpret as a welcome.

I did not unpack properly. I abandoned my case in the doorway and found a chair on the terrace, the kind with paint peeling in exactly the right places. The garden had this remarkable quality of being busy and still at once. Bees worked the lavender. A lizard did push-ups on a warm rock. The shadows moved so slowly you could almost track them, and I found myself doing exactly that, drink in hand, wondering when I had last spent ten minutes just watching light change.

The next few days dissolved into a rhythm so gentle it barely qualified as rhythm. I read three chapters of a novel before realising I had no idea what happened in any of them, too distracted by the swallows darting overhead. I moved from terrace to garden to the small kitchen and back again, always with something unnecessary in my hands, a cup of coffee, a piece of bread, a book I would set down and forget. The washing line I had admired on arrival became a sort of calendar, my few clothes appearing and disappearing, marking time in the most domestic, satisfying way.

I spoke to the cat more than I spoke to anyone else. We discussed the heat, the quality of the tomatoes from the village shop, whether I should bother walking to the bakery or just accept that today was a breadless day. The cat, being Greek, was firmly in favour of doing less.

On my final morning, I sat in that garden chair with my coffee going cold and realised I had not once checked my phone for entertainment. The entertainment was the fig tree, the donkey, the way the morning light hit the lemon tree differently than the afternoon light, as if the garden had moods I was only just learning to read. I had arrived in a state of chaotic incompetence and was leaving with dirt under my fingernails from herbs I had not meant to touch, a slight sunburn from naps I had not meant to take, and the certain knowledge that doing very little, done properly, is absolutely enough.