I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I managed to get my hire car stuck in a sheep gate before even reaching the cottage. There I was, wedged between two wooden posts on a gravel track somewhere on Oland, sheep staring at me with that particular judgement only livestock can manage, and my partner doing a very poor job of hiding laughter behind a road map. The gate was not, it turned out, the main entrance to anywhere. It was simply a gate, for sheep, and I had driven through it with the misplaced confidence of someone who had been awake since four in the morning.

Three hours earlier we had landed at Kalmar, collected our bags and a slightly dented Volvo, and crossed the bridge to Oland in a state of bleary optimism. The island stretched ahead flat and bright, all limestone pavement and big skies, and I immediately felt that particular loosening that comes from leaving proper roads behind. We were headed for a stuga in Lottorp, one of those traditional Swedish holiday cottages that promised red timber walls, a proper fireplace, and presumably some kind of existential calm.

The sat nav had other ideas. Or rather, I had other ideas about what the sat nav was telling me, which is how I ended up executing a three-point turn in a field while a border collie watched from a distance with professional interest. By the time we found the actual track to our cottage, my hands ached from gripping the steering wheel and my partner had developed a sort of hysterical giggling tic every time I suggested we "just try this lane."

The cottage itself appeared suddenly, tucked between birches and pines, and I felt instantly forgiven by the universe. Red paint, white trim, a little wooden deck with two chairs facing nothing in particular. The key was in a lockbox, the code worked first time, and we stepped inside to that particular smell of pine and old books and someone else's well-kept holiday. I opened the wrong cupboard looking for mugs and found a stash of board games from approximately 1987. My partner opened another wrong cupboard and found a fishing rod. We were, it seemed, going to be very bad at whatever this holiday required.

That first afternoon we walked without purpose, which is not something I normally permit myself. I am a person with itineraries, with lists, with a anxious relationship to unstructured time. But Oland does something to your sense of direction, or perhaps to your willingness to have one. We followed a path from behind the cottage that became a narrower path, then a sheep track, then simply grass between low stone walls. The limestone pavement crunched underfoot, yellow with lichen, and we found ourselves in a landscape that felt borrowed from another century.

I do not know what I expected from this corner of Sweden, but it was not this particular quality of quiet. Not emptiness, exactly, because there were birds everywhere, and the distant sound of something agricultural, and once a cyclist who passed us with a wave so friendly it felt almost excessive. But a kind of spaciousness in the attention, a permission to notice small things. A particular moss on a wall. The way the light fell across a field of barley. My own breathing, which I realised had been shallow for months.

We got properly lost only once, which I consider restrained. The path simply ended at a stone wall, and beyond it was a field of something growing in neat rows, and beyond that only more fields and the flat horizon. We had no phone signal, no map, and a shared inability to remember whether the cottage had been to our left or right when we set out. My partner sat on the wall and ate an apple with irritating serenity. I paced and made decisive statements about the position of the sun that turned out to be completely wrong.

We found our way back by following a stream that I am fairly certain we crossed earlier going in the opposite direction. The cottage appeared from a direction I would have sworn was impossible. I built a fire with more enthusiasm than skill, filling the room with smoke before achieving any actual warmth, and we ate crackers and cheese for dinner because the shop in Lottorp had closed at six and we had failed to plan like functional adults.

Sitting there with smoke in my hair and crumbs on my jumper, watching the fire settle into something approximating proper burning, I felt something shift. I am not a person who gets lost on purpose. I am not a person who opens wrong cupboards with curiosity rather than frustration. But there in that red timber cottage, with sheep probably still judging my driving somewhere in the distance, I understood something about the particular gift of accidents. The gate that was not for me had led, eventually, to this.

The next morning I would try to find that stream again, deliberately this time, and fail. I would discover a bakery by taking a wrong turning for milk. I would spend an hour watching a hare in a field because I had nowhere else I was supposed to be. But that first evening, with the fire finally behaving and the light lasting far longer than seemed reasonable, I simply sat with the unfamiliar pleasure of having arrived somewhere I had not planned to be.