Come to think of it, I've never seen anyone use a sickle either, but I remember that when I was a kid there was a sickle hanging on a nail in the garage. It didn't shine; it was too rusty. I suppose it was one of the tools my father had hung onto from his youth. He was a thrifty man, and if he thought something might be useful someday, he kept it. (He grew up on a farm, but moved to the city during WW2, when he was already too old to be drafted. I was born in 1947.)

We also had a pair of manual (i.e. non-electric) sheep shears. He did use those, to trim the grass around the edge of the sidewalk. After he got a more efficient pair of grass clippers, the sheep shears also retired to their spot, hanging on a nail in the garage, and served no further purpose except to educate an occasional child who asked "what's that?"

My father died in 1985. When my mother moved to a nursing home a few years ago, I looked at everything she left behind, picking out things to save, but the sickle, the sheep shears, and a lot of other old stuff had already disappeared.