#38: Welcome to Alliteration

New name, same newsletter

Aug 30, 2024

My desert island food is strawberries. I love the way they burst between my teeth like little gummies, all sweet and succulent. Put a carton of strawberries in front of me and I will eat them down to the leaf. Every year I rejoice when the air starts to warm because it means that fruit will soon come into season and I can stop relying on my tried-and-true Bonne Maman jam to deliver a berry fix. Finally, after a long drought, I can get the real thing. I can drive to the strawberry farm three towns up the road and stock my fridge. Strawberry pretzel pie, strawberry jam using a Pennsylvania Dutch recipe passed down through my dad’s family, cobblers and shortcakes and scones, spinach salad with thinly-sliced strawberries, goat cheese, and candied walnuts.

May and June are a skipping record, the same flavor profile over and over and over. Each year, I expect to tire of it. I expect that there will be a day when the idea of buying another carton of strawberries breeds a seed of revulsion. That I will crave something else for a change. And each year, that doesn’t happen. I continue to crave what I love without a desire for intervention. Like most things, I put this phenomena into literary terms: alliteration.

Alliteration is the repetition of a certain sound for effect or emphasis. The phrase “final four” is alliterative because is have those two F sounds. Alliteration comes in many forms: consonance is the repetition of a consonant sound, assonance the repetition of a vowel sound. Unvoiced, silent, dental, fricative, plosive, sibilance. All of these subcategories add new meaning to their respective text based on the sound they create. For example, dental alliteration (repetition of D and T sounds) can create a drum-like quality if they appear rhythmically in a poem. Sibilance (S, Sh, or Z) creates a whooshing quality like a snake or a gust of wind. Above all, alliteration draws the eye. No matter what kind of mood it creates, alliteration commands attention from the reader. It adds a layer of complexity and excitement that wasn’t there before.

To live alliteratively is to seek out the things we love shamelessly and with abandon. To alliteratively eat too many strawberries, get the same drink from the same coffee shop five days in a row, watch the same season of The Great British Baking Show. To return our eyes to things we love not out of requirement, but out of desire. To love the things we love wholeheartedly because they make us feel whole.

Good food with lots of garlic, freezing cold coconut La Croix, Diet Coke with lime, the feeling of the sun on my chest, a delicious friends-to-lovers romance book, a 200-year-old classic that makes me reevaluate my life choices, rhinestoned clothing, cool buildings with creaky floors, that rush of writerly energy when a scene is so interesting I have no choice but to pour it onto the page. Ella Enchanted and the smell of fresh-cut grass in July, also that pre-snow smell a few days before Christmas. Driving at dusk when the sky goes all lavender with slashes of neon grapefruit sunset in the rearview mirror. Crusty bread dipped in olive oil, sourdough and pimento cheese sandwiches. The impromptu decision to get a new piercing and the perfect post-beach outdoor shower. A flouncy dress that makes you feel like a princess. Long discussions about life on a road trip, the perfect gas station food-drink combo, a well-curated playlist, a new place that’s so beautiful you can’t imagine how you lived without seeing it. A fresh highlighter and crisp pen. Postcards. Chocolate croissants. A cup of tea that’s the perfect temperature. Clean-shaven legs on freshly-washed sheets. Waking up before your alarm, then realizing you have another two hours before you have to be properly awake.

Welcome to Alliteration, a thoughtfully-curated newsletter of things I love, on repeat.