Just about everyone has an attachment to the place where a loved rests for eternity. Today, religion editor Peg McEntee and religion writer Kristen Moulton - whose faith traditions intersect at some points and diverge at others - tell their stories of the cemeteries that draw them.

We invite you to give us your own cemetery stories. Send them to faith@sltrib.com and we will choose some for later publication.

Every summer, I am called to the Midway Cemetery, and I go to stand under the big cottonwood tree and talk to my mother.

Three years ago, my family gathered there to scatter her ashes near the headstones of the aunt, uncle and sister she grew up with on a farm just down the hill.

She'd come to the farm as a little girl, a casualty of a family's financial ruin, and her sister, Joy, joined her sometime later. They always said that if you had to live anywhere during the Great Depression, a dairy farm was the place to be.

My mother told countless stories about the farm, going to school, helping Auntie and Unc, long summer days herding cows in Snake Creek. It was a Mormon community, and Auntie had the idea that the only proper things to read were the Book of Mormon and Ensign magazine. So my mother smuggled books into the barn and wrote poetry that she'd fold up and bury in the tiny island in the creek.

Years later, I'd root around, looking for shreds of paper, and of course finding none. I, too, wrote poetry that really did deserve to be buried somewhere.

Mother would have six children and a handsome, eloquent husband named Bill who gave her joy and sometimes drove her crazy. Our homes -- and there were many -- were filled with books.

And always talk. Memories, politics, history, child-rearing, World War II, travel, feminism, poetry she could recite by heart, the many jobs she'd held, her occasional heartbreak.

All her grown kids would call her if they got sick, just to hear her say, "Oh, honey."

She was in her 70s when Alzheimer's began to steal her away from us. She'd tell the old stories time and again, and we would try to be patient. Toward the end, when she still had the power of speech, she seemed to be back on the farm.

"Oh," she'd say when we came to visit, "Unc will be so happy to see you."

After her death in a central California hospital, the family gathered and, tentatively, began to tell stories about her. Even today, I sometimes feel her essence and glance over my shoulder to see if she's there.

And in the summer, I go to the cemetery and stand under the cottonwood tree. I talk to her softly, and hope, maybe even know, that one day I'll hear her whisper back.