The sat-nav had been insisting for the last twenty miles that we were nearly there, which in Swedish terms apparently means "somewhere in this general forested area, good luck." My partner Dave was driving, I was navigating with the confidence of someone who had briefly glanced at a map three hours ago, and our hire car was making that worrying whining noise it had developed somewhere past Karlskrona. We were looking for a red wooden house near a lake in Blekinge, and every single house in southern Sweden is red and near a lake. It was late September, that awkward in-between time when the summer boats have been hauled out but the proper autumn colours haven't quite committed, and the light was doing that golden slanty thing that makes everything look like a furniture catalogue.

We found Holmsjoe eventually by the gloriously low-tech method of Dave spotting a red roof through birch trees and me recognising the slightly wonky jetty from the website photo. The mishap came when I confidently strode up what I assumed was the path to the front door, only to discover I was walking across the neighbour's vegetable patch. A very polite Swedish man emerged from his greenhouse to watch me extricate myself from a tangle of raspberry canes, and I spent the next five minutes apologising in increasingly frantic English while he nodded patiently, presumably wondering why British tourists cannot identify a private garden. Dave found this hilarious until he realised he'd parked across the neighbour's driveway. September in rural Sweden, we were learning, requires a certain humility.

The property itself sits right on the water's edge, and that first afternoon the lake was doing that extraordinary mirror-stillness thing that makes you feel like you're intruding on something private. The birch trees around the shore had started turning, proper lemon-yellow patches against the dark green of the pines, and there was a definite nip in the air that hadn't been there when we'd left London that morning. The owners had left the heating on low, and walking into the wooden interior felt like being folded into a warm blanket that smelled faintly of pine needles and whatever they'd used to treat the floorboards. There was a wood-burning stove in the corner, unlit but clearly ready for proper autumn duties, and a stack of birch logs outside that looked almost too perfectly arranged to disturb.

I keep thinking about that first evening, because it was so completely shaped by the season we happened to arrive in. In July, we'd have been swimming and barbecuing and staying outside until eleven. In January, presumably, we'd have been snowed in and learning to ice fish or something equally improbable. But late September occupied this strange, liminal space where the day felt summery until about four o'clock, when the temperature dropped like a stone and the darkness came on with surprising speed. We found ourselves in that very Swedish rhythm of making the most of every scrap of daylight, rushing down to the jetty after unpacking to sit with our feet dangling over the water while we still could, then retreating indoors as the chill set in to light candles and cook something substantial.

Dave attempted to use the rowing boat, which was still theoretically available, and made it approximately fifteen metres from shore before deciding that cold water and uncertain balance were not a combination he wished to explore further. He rowed back with the grim determination of a man who has proved something to himself, though I'm still not clear what. We watched him from the kitchen window, where I'd started making coffee on the assumption that hot drinks were now the appropriate response to most situations.

That first night, we slept with the windows cracked open because the air was so clean it felt wasteful not to, and I woke at some point to absolute silence and a room filled with moonlight on pale wood. The lake had frozen, I thought for one stupid moment, but no, it was just that perfectly still, that reflective. September in Blekinge, I realised lying there, is a season of almosts. Almost summer, almost autumn, almost too cold, almost too dark. It keeps you slightly off-balance, slightly more alert, slightly more grateful for the wood stove and the thick socks and the neighbour's patience with lost English people.

We stayed a week, and by the end I think I understood something about why the Swedes talk about seasons the way they do, not as backdrop but as active participant, as the thing that determines what you do and how you feel and whether you are currently a fool in a raspberry patch or a sensible person with a hot drink. I keep the wonky jetty photo on my phone now, and when London feels too much the same all year round, I look at it and remember that particular golden light, that particular cold snap, that particular moment of arriving somewhere just as it was changing into something else.