Eventually,we're outsidelooking in

In author Stephen King's epic "Dark Tower" series, characters journey through the "Waste Lands." It is a stale, colorless place where time itself is slowing because somehow the world has "moved on" to more vibrant environs in an alternative universe.

I thought of this as I peered through the windows of my parents' home the other day. The place was empty, with a for-sale sign in the yard. Without a key, I was an outsider, peeking into the house where my childhood unfolded and where my Mom and Dad lived for 56 years.

Now in their late 80s, they moved into a retirement apartment complex in June. They've jammed their most prized possessions into the new abode; must of the rest was sold at an estate sale. My last few trips to the old homestead in Keizer, Ore., have been to help with the transition. The same goes for my siblings scattered around the West. There were hundreds of books to box up, an attic and a shed to clean out. A seemingly endless task now ended.

I spent the night there a few times during this transition period, but I wasn't really back home. I sat on the patio and looked out at the back yard and the fir-shadowed field beyond, remembering Wiffle ball, touch football, ping-pong and a flimsy swimming pool that somehow held water for decades. It was the same old place, but it wasn't.

The world had already moved on.

Migration flows around us and through us. Some of the evidence is spectacular, like the spouting gray whales who hit the coast a week ago and the flocks of pelicans that wafted south Friday morning in advance of the season's first storm. Other evidence is societal, like the lame-duck administration in Washington, D.C., that awaits replacement by whoever wins today's election.

In the physical sense, of course, some of us do a lot more migrating than others. I had the luxury of growing up in a single place. The house was new when my parents moved into it with my older siblings in 1952 – it pretty much holds every early memory of mine. My own kids lived in a half-dozen or so places before going off to college. Because of its constancy, their grandparents' house in Keizer probably holds as much nostalgia for them as any home they lived in.

In 1962, many of its shingles blew off in the Columbus Day Storm. In 1964, the Willamette River flowed through it during the Christmas floods. Then there were the emotional storms inherent in raising four kids. I guess we had our share of disasters, but the fact is that every person who ever lived in that house is still alive and kicking.

I always figured that when the time came, the closing down of the homestead would somehow be the stuff of ceremony. Perhaps a family reunion and a backyard barbecue, with someone pulling out a plastic bat and baseball for one last game of "fly-up" (you catch the ball on the fly, you're up to bat).

Instead, it all happened on the fly. Mom and Dad clung to their independence for years, but when mounting health concerns reached a tipping point, their migration came in a blur of doctor's visits, hospital stays and much-discussed but rapidly made family decisions.

After peering through those windows into the emptiness of my childhood home, I got back in my car and made the five-minute drive to the apartment complex. My parents greeted me at their door.

I wasn't exactly home again, but I'd caught back up with the present. That's as good as it gets in this world.