I have never been so relieved to see a wooden gate in my entire life. After twelve hours of planes, trains, and a hire car that smelled suspiciously of pickled herring, I finally found the turning for Holmsjoe. Or rather, I found it, missed it, reversed back up a narrow lane while three very patient Swedes waited in their Volvos, and then found it again. My partner sat in the passenger seat pretending not to know me.

The sat-nav had given up three miles earlier, declaring in a clipped voice that we had reached our destination while we were still very much surrounded by pine forest and existential dread. But there it was, finally, a modest sign pointing down a gravel track that crunched satisfyingly beneath our wheels. The sort of crunch that says you have left the ordinary world behind and are now at the mercy of whatever holiday home awaits you.

I had worried, I will admit, about what we might find. The photographs online had been charming in that slightly too-perfect way that makes you suspect clever lighting and a forgiving camera angle. But stepping out of the car, the first thing that hit me was not disappointment. It was the smell of pine and water and something else I could not place, something clean and ancient. The archipelago air, I suppose, doing its thing without any effort at all.

The house sat among trees, red-painted and white-trimmed in that classic Swedish fashion that makes even a tired English traveller feel they have stumbled into something properly Scandinavian. A proper Holmsjoe, whatever that precisely means, though I gathered it refers to the little lake nearby. I had been practising the pronunciation for weeks and still mangled it when asking for directions at the petrol station in Karlshamn. The attendant had smiled kindly and switched to flawless English, which I took as both a relief and a mild humiliation.

The key was exactly where promised, in a little lockbox that required the sort of code-entry performance I normally associate with defusing bombs in films. I dropped it twice. My partner, still maintaining a diplomatic silence about the reversing incident, eventually prised it from my fumbling hands and opened the door.

Inside, the first impression was light. Great floods of it pouring through windows that looked out onto nothing but green and blue. The sort of view that makes you forget you were ever cramped in economy seating next to a man who snored like a malfunctioning chainsaw. The living area opened straight onto a deck, and beyond that, through a fringe of birch trees, I could see the water glinting. Holmsjoe itself, presumably, though at that moment it could have been any blessed stretch of Swedish water and I would have declared it paradise.

I am not normally one for immediate emotional responses to holiday accommodation. Usually I need a cup of tea and a proper inspection of the shower pressure before committing to any opinion. But standing there in my travel-wrinkled clothes, still smelling faintly of airport coffee, I felt something shift. The particular weight of ordinary life lifting slightly, just enough to notice.

My partner had already found the coffee maker and was making the sort of contented noises that suggested forgiveness for the hire car reversing incident might, eventually, be forthcoming. I stepped out onto the deck, barefoot because I could not be bothered with shoes any longer, and felt the wood warm beneath my feet. A bird called from somewhere in the trees, something unfamiliar and melodic, and I realised I had been holding my breath without knowing it.

The mishaps of the journey, the missed turning, the pickled herring car, the mangled Swedish, all of it suddenly seemed not just bearable but necessary. The long scramble towards this particular moment of standing on a wooden deck in Blekinge, slightly lost and entirely found, watching the afternoon light move across the water. I thought about how often I rush through arrivals, already planning the next thing, already half-departed in my mind. How rarely I let myself simply arrive somewhere and be arrived.

A mosquito bit my ankle. I swore, laughed, and went inside to find the tea bags.