It’s watermelon season again and I’ve been indulging myself quite a bit on this tasty, healthiest fruit imaginable. Whenever I eat it, I think of Ahmad, our neighbour in Skopje.

Ahmad was from Jordan and according to him, in the season Jordanians have watermelon parties. Every child gets a watermelon and they are supposed to open it without using a knife. So on one hot summer afternoon, Ahmad and I decided that we needed to explore his culture a bit. We bought a few huge watermelons and had a go at it. We had great fun!

We decided that we would turn this into a yearly tradition and use the watermelons that for sure would be growing in the garden, considering all the seeds that were left in the grass.

Ahmad was great with children. They simply loved him and he loved them. That same summer we had made a deal that I would cook dinner every night and he would play with the kids. Every afternoon was filled with weird games, chasing each other, volleyball, dressing up, mud pies and on and on. Ahmad enjoyed it just as much as they did. He fixed Julian’s bike and was about to teach him to cycle.

But that beautiful summer came to a tragic end. A few weeks later, Ahmad died in a car accident, leaving behind his wife and five-year old girl, Sara. He wasn’t a saint, or a hundred percent pedagogically responsible parent. But he did know how to live life, enjoy having children and how to be a friend. He had his struggles and was wondering what his next steps should be as an unemployed expat partner. He was thinking about faith, grieving over the death of his father a few months before. He had a Macedonian shepherd dog puppy that turned out to be an enormous, barking beast that ate about half a cow a day.

I still miss him. Never will I get a neighbour like him again. I am so thankful that I got to know him. And I hope that Sara will keep on remembering him the way he was, one of the best dads a child could ever have wished for.

We didn’t have a party that following year. Without Ahmad it would never have been the same. I did look for watermelon plants in the garden, but no seed had decided to sprout as a remembrance of that wonderful afternoon in the summer of 2007.