One Fine Day
by Nonny Hogrogian
Summary
Nonny Hogrogian retells an old Armenian folktale about a fox caught helping himself to a bowl of milk left out by an old woman; furious, she grabs a knife and cuts off his tail on the spot as punishment. The fox begs to have his tail sewn back on, and the old woman agrees, but only if he first replaces the milk he stole, sending him on a chain of increasingly frustrating errands, a cow will trade milk for grass, a field will trade grass for water, a spring will trade water only if the fox brings back a jug, and on through several more exchanges before the fox finally works his way back to the start of the chain with everything he needs. He delivers the milk, the old woman sews his tail back on exactly as promised, and the fox trots proudly home whole again, having earned back through patience and persistence what his own greed had cost him in a single careless moment.
Hogrogian both retold the story and illustrated it herself, rendering the Armenian countryside, the cow, the field, the spring and every stop along the fox's errand in warm earth tones, with figures that, as Kirkus put it, "pose slyly in the subdued brightness of a truly fine day". It suits children around four to eight, and its repeating structure of one request answered by another makes the fox's long chain of trades easy to follow and predict well before he finally makes it home.
Historical Context & Significance
One Fine Day, published by Macmillan in 1971, won Hogrogian her second Caldecott Medal in 1972, five years after her first for Always Room for One More, making her one of the handful of illustrators to win the medal twice; that year's Honor books were Arnold Lobel's Hildilid's Night, Janina Domanska's If All the Seas Were One Sea and Tom Feelings's Moja Means One. She added a Caldecott Honor of her own in 1977 for The Contest.
The New York Times later credited Hogrogian with "bringing multiculturalism to children's literature" through books like this one, drawing directly on her own Armenian heritage. Her parents had fled the Armenian genocide before she was born, and her retellings of Armenian folk material across her career gave American children's books a source of folklore that had rarely appeared there before. She married the writer David Kherdian in 1971 and went on to illustrate several of his poetry anthologies, the two spending two years in New Hampshire and seven on a farm in Oregon before later moves that ended in western Massachusetts.