I kept my sickle in the garage, next to my scythe with the double-fisted handle and the really big curved blade for scything big swaths.

I used the scythe at Halloween to put it through a pumpkin which scared everyone, including me.

I was proud of my sickle, because not everybody had one.

The sickle got a bum rap politically by association with the hammer.

I used the sickle to cut the weeds in the parkway and the tall grass in the backyard.

Then I looked it up. It’s very old. Earlier people used it to cut things like wheat and barley so they could separate the grain from the chaff by threshing it. That took another tool, the thresher. You pound a pile and throw it up in the air so the wind will blow away the lighter chaff while the heavier grain, like wheat (and maybe oats? I’ll look it up) falls down in a pile where you scoop it up and take it to a mill where they grind it into four and you make bread. Sometimes they make alcohol. It’s complicated, like everything.

That’s why I’m not a farmer. Agriculture is complicated.

It’s not all just plowing and sowing and reaping.

You have to know things like when and how and what and what not.

I don’t even know what.

Anyway, the sickle.

At first I thought it came with the house and garage. Then I remembered that I brought it from Riverside where we rented a big house with a barn, and I got a free month’s rent for tearing down the barn, which I did, which unearthed the sickle and the scythe. (Sounds like a comedy team or a music group, doesn’t it? Sickle and Scythe. Somebody may already have thought of it and used it, otherwise you heard it here first, folks…).

The sickle handle fits my hand perfectly, and lengthens my arm for a longer swing. As I said, I cut the grass in the parkway and the weeds in the back yard. Or vice versa. Then I got a lawnmower, and retired the sickle to the archives where it hangs ready.

Then I thought about it some more. I remembered with mixed emotions the famous “prank” the upper classmen at UCR pulled to strike a blow for a smaller intimate campus and against over-expansion.

At night they took brushes and buckets of white paint up the mountain, and in the morning we all saw that the Big C had been transformed into a hammer and sickle, and we all know what that means, especially in 1960. It scared some people away. My mixed emotions are because they didn’t let us freshmen in on it.   

I’ve been excluded from things before and since, and it’s never fun or pretty.

When people say, “You’re a tool,” they’re not talking about my sickle.

Anyway, I don’t see people, even farmers, using sickles very much anymore, partly because of the symbolism, guilt by association, and everyone is being watched.

But I’m keeping the sickle. It’s a good tool. It fits the hand. It’s in the garage, hanging on the wall, the last time I looked.

It’s also in Russian novels. Anna Karenina. Levin was upper class, but he had to join the farmers in the field, sharing the labor. At first he was awkward and got blisters and couldn’t keep up. Then he learned not to think about it, got the swing of things, an extension of his upper body, and mowed the swath with the best of them. Actually, I think he used a scythe, like in the painting, The Mowers.

He learned democracy, and practiced it.

No wonder it’s symbolic, and a metaphor.

I know where it is, and how to use it.