In the garden behind my neighbour's house there grew a fruit tree.

In three seasons of the year there was nothing remarkable about its appearance. In winter its long boughs strained under the snow and ice; in spring it flourished with pale pink and white blossoms that scattered in the breeze; in autumn the green leaves that had sprouted in the summer shrivelled and dropped, and were strewn across frost-covered patio tiles.

But in summer, the tree's magic was revealed, for in summer it gave three different fruits at once. On its three main branches grew peaches, plums, and apricots. It was not quite the tree of twelve fruits that the Bible mentioned in passing, but it was close. And these were fruits of unimaginable palatability, fruits plump with the sweet ambrosial nectars of paradise that healed soul-aches and lightened heavy hearts. And unlike its primordial twelve-fruit kin, this tree demanded no price for its fruit; it was simply there, always, giving and giving, asking nothing more than love and attention. It was magical; it was the tree of life.

My first clear memory is of the tree and its cultivator, Mr. D'Amico. I don't hold with those who claim to remember their own births and all that; rather I believe that while we do become alive at the time of conception, we do not fully attain consciousness until several years have passed. Only then can we start thinking and feeling for ourselves, judging, empathizing. For me, that landmark date of the beginning of sentience was a hot dry midsummer morning when I was five years old.

Old Mr. D'Amico had planted the tree long before I was born. The branches rustled their green leaves over the fence. I was playing alone, sitting on a plastic kids' picnic table in the backyard and blowing big clear rainbow- patterned bubbles that floated up to the wide blue sky.

They didn't get far, though, because the shell of a bubble is about one millionth of an inch thick, and it takes only a little heat and dryness to pop them. I didn't know the scientific explanation for it then, obviously; but I had my own theories. I thought that when I blew a bubble, a secret wish of mine escaped in my breath and was trapped inside in the translucent sphere, to be taken up to the heavens. If the bubble reached God, in whom I still believed in those days, He would grant my wish; if not, I would have to keep blowing bubbles, ephemeral wish-carriers, up to the skies.

As I sat sending wishes to God, I heard the screen door of the neighbours' house scrape shut. Then old Mr. D'Amico limped to the fence and peered over. Mr. D'Amico was a World War II veteran, had fought in the Italian army-but I knew little beyond that. He claimed that the leg injury was a souvenir of a heroic and victorious battle, on which he was happy to elaborate; but his daughter, with whose family Mr. D'Amico lived (for he refused to live in a retirement home), disclosed to my mother that Mr. D'Amico had actually been stabbed in the leg in a barroom brawl. Thereafter much of the romance went out of Mr. D'Amico's infirmity; but he was still a kind man, albeit somewhat eccentric.

"What are you doing there?" he asked, his English still touched with an Italian accent.

"Blowing bubbles," I answered, wary to relate to him my theory on wish shipping.

He observed my activity for a while, then commented, "They pop fast. It's too hot for bubbles."

Privately I thought the bubbles had been short-lived because I had been bad this summer, ripping my new sundress and later staining it with blood when I pricked myself on a sewing needle furtively trying to mend it; but I nodded and put down my bubble-blower.

"You need a dog," said Mr. D'Amico. "You have no one to play with."

"I can play by myself," I said. Mr. D'Amico grinned.

"Yes, that is good also. I am by myself often too. You want a peach?" He nodded towards the fruit tree.

"Yes, please," I said politely, as my mother had taught me, and hopped off the picnic table.

The fence between Mr. D'Amico's backyard and ours was fairly flimsy, erected almost as an afterthought when all the houses had been built. It was made of criss-crossing wooden slats, almost like the rose-bedecked trellis by our front door but thicker, and was quite low. I could easily slide my little sandalled feet into the square holes between the diagonal wooden slats to climb the fence. I was getting good at keeping my balance once on top and, more importantly, avoiding rough places where I could get painful splinters.

So I deftly scaled the fence to be eye level with Mr. D'Amico. He watched carefully, but did not rebuke me for being unsafe. That, I think, was part of why I liked him so much: he was one of those rare adults who remembered youth well enough to refrain from admonishing risk-taking, but he would usually stop you from doing something really stupid.

That day, however, he only asked me, "What kind of fruit do you want? Peach, plum or apricot?"

"But there's only one tree," I said, bewildered.

"I know," said Mr. D'Amico. He pointed. "There, plums. There, peaches, and here, apricots."

"Is it a magical tree?" I asked, astonished.

Again Mr. D'Amico favoured me with his grin. "Magic-magic, yes!"

"I want a magic peach-please."

"So do I," said Mr. D'Amico. He picked two peaches and handed one to me. "Now we will share the magic," he said.

Every day of the summer from then on, I would climb the fence and call to the open screen door, "Mr. D'Amico, can I have a peach?" Or an apricot, or a plum, they were all good. There was always fruit on the tree in summer. Mr. D'Amico would come out to the backyard and we would enjoy a fruit from the magical tree together. In fall the old man retreated into the house for the duration of the winter. I came to believe he hibernated like bears and rabbits. In spring he would venture outside again, and sit in his backyard in a lawn chair and sometimes fall asleep, and wake up littered with peach and apricot and plum blossoms.

My skepticism of the presence of God first began when I was eight. In Sunday school I noted several mentions of the trees of knowledge and life- but I also saw a verse that outlawed the practice of witchcraft because it went against the laws of God. I was confused. Was Mr. D'Amico a herald of God or a heathen wizard? It was no use asking him about it, I soon learned; he balked at questions of creed, being himself an agnostic (having rejected Catholicism, claiming that Pope Pius XI had once deliberately tripped him in the street). I wanted to believe that God had created Mr. D'Amico's tree in the image of the Edenic ones; but kindly as he was, I knew Mr. D'Amico could not be an envoy of Heaven, and I was ashamed to have consorted with the Devil's servant.

And as I grew up I slowly realized that it was not a definite question of good or evil. There had to be degrees in between, like gradations of colours in a rainbow. Yet the Bible with which I had grown up was so clear- cut in its definitions of human character that my graded system seemed impossible. It didn't fit in with His plan. But if the plan was not real- that was what pushed me towards atheism. God, then, could not be real, because that automatically excluded the reality of other truths in my world.

But, holy or not, Mr. D'Amico and the tree were always there; and it was a good thing, too, because summers seemed like the worst times of the year for me. It was summer when I was six and my mother took a course in hairdressing and tried to use my head for practice, and ended up giving me the shearing of a lifetime, a slip of the scissors that would take months to grow back. It was summer when I was ten and my father was in a car accident, and I cried to Mr. D'Amico from my precarious balance on the fence the whole week that he spent in the hospital. It was summer when I was thirteen and Lukas Kurstot told Wendy Simpson he liked her, even though I was the one who had had a crush on him forever. It was also summer when I was sixteen and I got my driver's licence and promptly backed the car into a maple tree. The magic tree, I was certain, only gave me sour fruits for two weeks afterwards, before it would forgive me for damaging its kin.

And in July, the month after I graduated from high school, I travelled to France to stay with my aunt Sylvie at her vineyard in Provençal. Mr. D'Amico told me to bring back photos and as much wine as I could fit in my suitcase. On the verdant slopes of Provençal, Aunt Sylvie taught me about wine grapes and botany. In that decade genetically modified organisms were unheard of, but botanists liked to play with their crops, trying to manually cross-breed them so that they would develop better resistance to pests and disease. And so I learned about grafting, where a severed branch from one specimen is fixed to another to combine their best characteristics.

I came back to Canada at the end of the summer very upset. Mr. D'Amico was no magician, nor was he God; he was simply an amateur botanist who had grafted three trees together. And he had let me believe in magic for my entire life. He had caused me to doubt my religion. Now I felt like a fool.

When I got home I went straight to the backyard, and remembered the first time I had met Mr. D'Amico, and how I had been small enough to climb the flimsy wooden trellis. I couldn't climb it anymore, I was too old and too heavy now. So I stood by the fence and called, "Mr. D'Amico! Mr. D'Amico, come outside, I want to talk to you!"

After a minute of my shouting, his aging daughter came to the screen door.

"What are you yelling for? Don't you know how ill my father is?"

That froze me. "What?"

"Last month he had a stroke. Now he's paralyzed from the waist down. He can't come out to see you."

I was thunderstruck. A stroke? But Mr. D'Amico was not so old. And then I thought about it-he had to be at least seventy by now. "May I see him?"

She looked at me askance, but my consternation must have been evident on my face, because she silently held the screen door open. I skinned my knees scrambling over the fence, but I no longer cared.

Mr. D'Amico lay on the sofa in the cat-perfumed living room. I could see the tree through the window. Mr. D'Amico looked asleep, but his eyes opened when I came in, moving cautiously because of my mixed anger and shame.

"How was France?" he asked. His words were slurred. Tears filled my eyes, though I didn't know why.

"Fabulous," I said softly. "I learned about grapes and agriculture and- grafting."

He nodded. His complacence enraged me. "You told me it was magic!" I cried.

"No, you told me it was magic. I let you believe what you wanted to believe. It's different."

"It's no different! How do you know what I want? You lied to me!"

Mr. D'Amico struggled to sit up. "Lied? You were a child. Would you have understood if I had said I cut off two branches and sewn them to another tree? Of course not. And by the time I could explain I was caught in the magic as well. You believed in magic, and so I also began to believe."

"But it wasn't magic at all, it was science!"

"It was magic," insisted Mr. D'Amico. "Do you think that such succulent fruits occur naturally? Fruits that illuminate dark days and heal broken hearts? That is what the tree did for you and for me. The science made the three different fruits on the tree, yes-but the love of the old man who planted it and his dear protegee for the tree, that was what made it magic."

I wept. His words were beautiful-but I still couldn't believe him. Was I hearing the discourse of an oracle, or the poison of a sly snake? My wounded pride and cheated feelings clouded my memories. I couldn't remember the taste of magic in the fruits, only of bitter dishonesty. It was no tree of life-it was the tree of deceit. Its fruits were a mockery of nature's true produce.

"I can't believe you," I said, shaking my head. "You humiliated me."

Mr. D'Amico shrugged sadly and lay back down. "Then go, and let an old man die quietly. But I am sorry. Good-bye, and if there is such a thing as God and Satan, I hope we meet again in Heaven, and not in the other place." He closed his eyes. I went out, crying, and climbed over the fence, and went home.

Mr. D'Amico died before the frosts of autumn touched his tree, so he was spared the sight of the death of the tree of life. Whoever does control the universe granted the old man that mercy. But shortly after Mr. D'Amico's death, his daughter's family moved away from our neighbourhood, and a new family moved in. They uprooted the tree of life to make room for a swimming pool.