While walking home the other night, Bonnie O’Reilly noticed a couple kissing under her tree growing in her front yard. “And they went, ‘Oh! Is it alright?’” Bonnie recalls, before responding that of course it was okay, because this was no ordinary tree. “It’s the Kissing Tree.” Bonnie says that made the couple smile, because after months of him carrying around a ring, he’d just happened to find this perfect place under the branches of the Kissing Tree to propose. “She went, ‘I just got engaged!’” Bonnie smiles, before imitating how the woman extended her shaking hand to show the ring on her finger. Over the past couple of decades, Bonnie says countless couples have been inspired by the tree that’s growing from her yard over the sidewalk. After it created a natural arch that people can walk under, Bonnie had lights hung in the branches to make the space feel even cozier. “When you’re under the tree, the rest of the world doesn’t exist,” Robert Sassade said. He and his wife Theresa Quillevere say they’ve stopped to kiss under the tree countless times. “It’s like a little magical tree,” Theresa smiles, before the couple walk hand in hand under the tree and share a kiss. But to appreciate the roots of the Kissing Tree, you have to meet “Brian from the Bronx”. “Everybody goes crazy for the tree,” Brian O’Reilly said when we first met him a decade ago. He told us about that day he went for a drive in 1972, took a wrong turn, and got stuck in a crowd waiting for a Rolling Stones concert. Then a riot broke out, and Brian had to protect himself with the only thing he had, a tape recorder that just happened to be in his car. “I wasn’t recording on purpose,” Brian explained. “I just had the microphone in my hand, and I had my arm up like this to defend myself and I was asking why he was hitting me.” That recording was quoted on TV and in the newspaper he still had. The incident was so unsettling, Brian left the U.S., moved to B.C., and befriended Bonnie. “He said, ‘I don’t want to date you. I want to marry you,’” Bonnie recalls after she and Brian had been friends for years. “It felt amazing and wonderful because I had fallen in love with him.” So she said, ‘Yes’. After embracing under the branches, the couple would feel for that one bad day down there in the U.S., that turned into 38 wonderful years under the tree. “It changed my entire life,” Brian smiled. Although Brian died a few years ago, Bonnie is ensuring their legacy of love lives on by maintaining the Kissing Tree for others. “If you can come here and have an aha moment, isn’t that wonderful? Wouldn’t you like to do that for everyone?” Bonnie smiles before walking under the Kissing Tree, wrapping her arms around its trunk and giving it a hug. “It’s pure love.”
