I’ve been leaving home since I was 17. I call it home, though I’ve lived elsewhere longer than I was ever there. It’s home because my mum and dad are still there, it’s where I was small and young. It’s home because no matter where I actually live, I know I’m from there. I always go home eventually, but I always leave again too.
In September 2021, I returned home to Scotland for the first time in almost three years. It isn’t typical that I’m away so long, but the stresses of self-employment and the pandemic kept me marooned in Berlin, where I’ve lived for nine years. When I landed in Inverness—known locally as the “Invernational”—my mum and dad stood waiting for me in arrivals.
Summer was shifting to autumn, the colors only just turning at the edges. The grass would soon recede, the green would dull and dilute, and the murkiness of winter would bring a damp chill, a slow, cold steep. But not yet. The landscape was still fleshy. Moss grew everywhere. On the drive home, I noted familiar trees, the Highland cows at Bogallan, the tall radio mast at the top of Mount Eagle. At night, the pairs of red lights dotting its slender steel frame looked like cars ascending into the sky.
My parents’ house sits at the edge of a forest of oak, birch, Scots pine, and larch. At night, the forest sinks back into silhouette until only the quiet chorus of the wind in the branches remains. I like to go outside without a torch, to walk into the blackness, listen to the silence, and look up at the stars. No traffic sounds, no helicopters flying over Mauerpark trying to disperse groups of youths, no neighbors loudly playing Graceland on repeat for weeks on end. In June that year, I had lost my business. As it slipped away from me, I suffered from insomnia, but in the deep silence of my parents’ home, I slept for ten hours.
When my parents moved north from Edinburgh in 1979, they left behind my dad’s side of the family. Mum and Dad chose to raise their family on a Highland farm, and I always felt like it made us the odd ones out. But when I started looking through my grandmother’s photo albums after she died, I learned that my parents’ move north was actually a return of sorts. My maternal great-grandparents met in Sutherland—a farming county with dramatic landscapes around 40 miles northeast of my childhood home—and the family had ties to the area for over 130 years.
The next day, my parents and I visited their graves. We started with Alexander Graham, my great-great-grandfather, who’s buried in Golspie, a small town in Sutherland. We took the A9 north, along the shore of the Cromarty Firth, past the oil rigs tethered at Invergordon. The road follows the curve of the land, and as we drove past Tain, heading towards the Dornoch bridge, I started to connect it to the landscape of Northern California, where my husband was born. On our first visit there together, he took me to the town of Inverness, named by an immigrant Scottish landowner. When my husband visited the area as a child, he’d imagined it must be what Scotland looked like. It doesn’t really, though the desolate windsweptness did remind me of Sutherland. We crossed the Dornoch bridge, and when we entered Golspie, it was like I hadn't been there before. I’d even forgotten that it was on the coast. We turned onto the road to the cemetery and the hill rose so aggressively we could’ve been in San Francisco.
The stone marking Alexander Graham’s grave was peach granite, tall and quite grand. An enormous yew tree flanked it on one side. My great-great-grandmother Jane Milne was buried alongside Alexander and both of their children, Betty and William (my great-grandfather). Looking around at the other memorials, I was reminded of the antiquated Highland tendency to feminize typically masculine names. Hughina, Donaldina, Angusina, Williamina.
A 15-minute drive through a valley to a hilltop is the cemetery at St Callan’s, Rogart. That’s where the Murrays, the other side of my maternal family, are buried. My great-grandmother Jean, who walked the steep and winding road to St Callan’s church on Sundays with her family, morning and evening, insisted on being buried there alongside her parents. High on the hill, the landscape rolled through shades of green, the fields outlined by stone dikes. In a field nearby, three people were picking tatties by hand, the way it’s always been done.
The sun was bright, but the wind licked its warmth away as we headed back to the car. The next stop was my grandmother’s grave. I’ve known soft, sweet grandmothers, but she wasn’t one of them. She was heavy-handed, brutally clumsy, a seasoned gossip, and a compulsive liar. She was viciously mean to her only child, my mother. She was in a desperate state at the end, completely immobile, virtually deaf and blind, a tumor in her breast and a failing heart. Her isolation was her own making, but the thought of her suffering left me breathless. As I sat in my apartment in Berlin waiting for news of her death, I’d never felt further away from home.
Foundering on the edge of financial ruin, I couldn’t go home when she died in April 2021. I sat on a great lump of rock in Mauerpark, waiting for my brother to start a video call, then cried hot, guilty tears as I watched my parents and siblings lower Grandma’s coffin into the ground.
When my parents and I arrived at Urquhart cemetery, I hardly recognized it. It had been 15 years since I'd visited my grandfather’s grave. Then, the cemetery was only half full, but death charges on and there was barely a free plot now. Grandma was buried with Grandad, reunited after 30 years. I noticed that the ground had sunk into a shallow dip in front of their grave. Directly behind their headstone, another family had built a shrine for their deceased beloved. Bouquets of bleached imitation flowers, plastic pinwheel spinners, Astroturf, unopened cans of Gordon’s Gin & Tonic. Grandma would’ve had something to say about it. I brushed the layer of dried grass cuttings from her headstone and returned to the car.
Back home, when I looked through Grandma’s photo albums, I saw her like I’d never seen her before: as a little girl, as a dutiful teenager going to church with her family, running on a beach as a young woman, dressed up with her friends at a dance. On her wedding day with my grandfather, their youth practically bursting from the page. I saw my mother as a tiny baby, all the pets, the friends, the places they lived. Their four years spent on an RAF base in Singapore, documented in boxes and boxes of slides. The parties and poolside gatherings, the ease and glamor of life as an armed services wife in the sixties. I was only eight when my grandfather died, and I was thrown by how little I knew of him. I met his parents in these pictures and was completely enamored by a photo of his mother, Daisy, holding up my mother as a baby. I met Daisy’s parents, and their parents too. I noted how my brother was the spitting image of Grandad, and Mum told me she saw it the moment he was born. There was picture after picture of Grandad playing with Mum, their love for each other radiating through the black-and-white. All these lives, full and distinct, laid out before me, already lived. In the photos of Grandma playing with my siblings and me, there was a tenderness that I didn't have any memory of. You could make up any story you liked about who she was just by looking through these pictures.
As the week passed, I spent time in my parents’ garden. Bumblebees congregated on the pink flower canopies of a sedum bush. They weren’t busy, just resting there, enjoying their final days. When it rained, they sheltered on the undersides of the flowers. Twice, I looked out of the window in the morning to see a roe deer and her fawn grazing at the bottom of one of our fields. I watched my mum’s Shetland ponies sprint in huge circles in the pouring rain, kicking up lumps of sod behind them. I stopped to look at the mushrooms growing in the damp, virtually lightless areas of the woods. I’d have liked to pick the right ones and take them back for breakfast, but I knew better than to guess. I watched the goldfinches on the garden bird feeder, and I told my mum and dad about how they tore the petals off the sunflowers we grew on our balcony in Berlin.
On my last morning, I got up early and took the dogs into the woods. I noticed the underside of an oak tree leaf covered in galls. A white fungus dusted the forest floor, as though the first snow had arrived months too early. The rising sun flickered between the trees, the brambles grew fat on their thorny limbs. The same streams and burns that I’ve always known ran like veins through the forest. Everywhere I looked, I recognized myself, and I wished the morning would become elastic, that the hours would stretch beyond their limits. But soon enough I was leaving home again, waving goodbye to my parents in the same spot we’d met a few days before. As I prepared to board the plane, I thought of all the papery shadows we shed over our lifetimes. We leave them tucked away in the places we’ve been and loved, collected in the trees and the moss and the streams. They wait for our return to remind us of who we are, and they always welcome us home, no matter how long we’ve been away.
This recipe is in honor of my grandma. She liked to eat this by the spoonful or drizzled on her cornflakes with double cream instead of milk. Caramel can seem quite daunting, and it can go wrong very easily. You’ll need to be very attentive, but luckily it doesn’t require much more than that to get it right. This is a very versatile sauce that can be spooned over ice cream, sandwiched with some buttercream between dark chocolate sponges, or poured into a deep pool and topped with chocolate mousse. You can enjoy it warm or cold, though my preference is usually room temperature.
Caramel sauce
250 grams granulated sugar
¾ teaspoon fine salt
30 grams water
130 grams heavy cream
50 grams unsalted butter
Equipment
Heavy-based saucepan (I use a 2-liter pan)
Heatproof spatula
Pastry brush
Add the sugar, salt, and water to the saucepan and use a spatula to mix it together so the dry ingredients are wet. Set the spatula aside, then place the saucepan over a medium-high heat.
The most important thing here is not to stir the mixture. Instead of stirring, swirl the saucepan around. If you have a lot of sugar crystals around the edge of the saucepan, use a pastry brush dipped in a bit of cold water to brush them down into the wet mixture. The sugar will start to melt and the whole thing will become liquid. It will start to bubble and after about five minutes or so, you will see the color start to change.
It will look slightly yellow at first, and the bubbling will start to slow down. It’s essential to keep a close eye on it now. Swirl the saucepan occasionally, and once the mixture has turned an amber color and starts to smoke, remove from the heat. Immediately add the cream.
The mixture will bubble ferociously. Once the bubbling calms a bit, use a heatproof spatula to mix it all together. Once the bubbling stops, add the butter a few chunks at a time, stirring until each piece has been incorporated before adding more.
Pour into a serving jug if you’ll use it right away, or into a glass container to cool down if you’re preparing it for later.
Thank you for bringing us to your patch of Scotland ♥️ and sharing all the ways to enjoy this heavenly creation.