re-goatmower

The gentle redress of a knotted thing — unfucking the goat, says the household ledger, in the plain speech of the smithy. This repository is the patient comb: a working-over of a tangled, contrary, goat-shaped project, taken burr by burr until it stops biting. It is done in Python, one commit at a time — each knot tested before it is pulled, each repair proved against the wall before the next is attempted. Nothing is cut that is holding anything up. It exists because some knots are load-bearing: the work can be saved, but only by hand, and only slowly — which is, not coincidentally, the garden's entire doctrine.

Gobán Saor, the master builder of the old tales, had a rule about apprentices' work: never cut the botch out in front of them — comb it later, when nobody is watching, so the wall stands and the boy does too. This repository is that second visit. Something in the garden — a knotted, contrary, goat-shaped contrivance that had carried its share of the household's work and tangled as it went — had been left standing where it stood, burrs and all, the way a wall with a bad course is left standing until there is time. The patient comb was taken to it one commit at a time, each knot tested before it was pulled, because the first law of the old smiths holds everywhere: some knots are load-bearing, and the craftsman's task is to learn which before anything is cut. What the pooka rode hard at dusk, the morning combs gentle, and the wall never came down between the two. The moss, which approves of anything done slowly, has already claimed the smooth stretches.