During the early 70s, M.F.K. Fisher moved from her large Victorian home in St. Helena to a unique three-room palazzino, designed by David Bouverie on his Glen Ellen ranch. Mary Frances named her new home Last House and slowly adjusted to life among the natural waterfalls, streams, vineyards, and pastures. But she was also careful to balance living the Valley of the Moon with living in older, familiar landscapes. Provence drew her like a magnet, and in 1973, 1976, and 1978, with her sister Norah as a companion, she lived for extended periods of time Marseille and Aix, This article focuses on the changes that occurred in Fisher's life when she left the Napa Valley and took up residence in the Sonoma Valley and the different direction her writing took at this time. Of importance also so is her account of the changes that had occurred in Provence since she lived there in the early 60s, and the re-telling of her adventures in living and preparing meals in the various impromptu kitchens that she and her sister lived in while they each pursued their various projects in Aix and Marseille.

The First Insouciant Spell "The First Insouciant Spell" is one of the key chapters from Joan Reardon's Poet of the Appetites: The Lives and Loves of M.F.K. Fisher in which the newly-married Mary Frances Kennedy sails from California with her husband Alfred Fisher to study in France. They enroll at the University of Dijon, where she learns the language and literature of the country and is initiated into the gastronomy of Burgundy, one of the famous wine-growing regions of France. Living in a pension in the midst of family celebrations and crises gave Fisher an intimate knowledge of the closed circle of French family life, and it supplied her with a cast of characters she would introduce into her books over the years. It was in Dijon also that she developed her special fondness for waiters, shopkeepers, and taxi drivers, and the experience inspired her earliest writings about food and wine.