I had been looking forward to our long weekend in Neede for weeks, so naturally I spent the entire train journey from Amsterdam convinced I had left the cottage keys on the kitchen table in Leeds. I checked my bag seventeen times. Seventeen. The keys were, of course, exactly where they should have been, tucked in my coat pocket the whole time. My partner found this hilarious. I found it less so, particularly after discovering I had also packed three left gloves and no right ones. Autumn does strange things to the brain, I think. All that golden light and crisp air tricks you into feeling capable and organised when really you are just a squirrel with a credit card.

We arrived in Neede in late October, when Gelderland is doing that spectacular Dutch thing of being simultaneously beautiful and slightly inconvenient. The trees along the country lanes had turned every shade of burnt orange and deep crimson, and the late afternoon sun slanted through them in that particular autumnal way that makes everything look like a painting you are not quite sophisticated enough to appreciate properly. The cottage sat at the end of a narrow track, surrounded by hedgerows still heavy with blackberries that had gone slightly past their best, the kind you tell yourself you might pick but never actually do.

The first thing that struck me was the smell. Woodsmoke from somewhere nearby, damp earth, rotting leaves in the best possible sense. That rich, mushroomy decay that only happens when summer has properly given up and winter has not yet committed to arriving. The air felt thick with it, almost chewable. I stood in the tiny garden for a full five minutes just breathing, while my partner wrestled our suitcase through a door that had clearly been built in a more compact era of human history.

The cottage itself was exactly what you want from a Neede holiday let in autumn. Low ceilings, slightly uneven floors, windows that rattled encouragingly in the evening breeze. The heating had been left on low, and stepping inside from the chill was like walking into a hug from someone who has been expecting you. There was a wood burner in the corner, already laid with kindling, and I felt an embarrassingly primal satisfaction at the thought of lighting it later. We are simple creatures, really. Give us fire and a dry roof and we think ourselves kings.

The light faded fast, as it does at that time of year, and we found ourselves rushing to unpack before we lost the sun entirely. I kept getting distracted by the garden, though. A robin had appeared on the fence, plump and furious, watching us with the territorial intensity that only robins manage in October when they have decided a particular patch of shrubbery belongs to them and them alone. I tried to take a photograph. It was blurry and rubbish. Some things are not meant to be captured, I suppose, only noticed.

By the time we walked into the village for supplies, proper darkness had fallen, and with it a mist that seemed to rise from the fields rather than descend from the sky. The street lamps in Neede gave off that warm amber glow that makes autumn evenings feel like a conspiracy between light and weather to keep you slightly melancholy in the most pleasant way. We bought bread and cheese and a bottle of red from a shop where the woman behind the counter seemed genuinely surprised to see tourists this late in the season, as if the entire concept of visiting Gelderland in autumn was a slightly eccentric hobby she had not previously encountered.

That first evening, we ate by candlelight because the electricity flickered once and we panicked, though it turned out to be nothing. The wood burner crackled and popped, and outside the mist thickened until the garden disappeared entirely. I thought about how different this would feel in summer, all bright evenings and open windows, and felt quietly glad we had come now instead. There is something about autumn that strips a place back to its essentials, makes you notice the bones of it, the way the cottage held warmth, the way the darkness pressed against the glass like something curious but not unfriendly.

I fell asleep that night to the sound of wind in the bare branches, already half-dreaming of morning mist and the particular silence of a village that has not quite woken up yet, and I knew with the certainty of the well-rested that I had definitely not forgotten anything else important, probably, almost certainly not.