I’ve been pushing myself off the garage floor for a couple of years now, instead of just jumping up as if my knees were made of spring-loaded titanium. I’ve been making weird noises during the process too, like grunting and exhaling loudly like a ticked off ‘Squatch.

But I didn’t know I was finally old until I discovered that I have a ‘good’ bucket, knew how to fix a lawn spreader, and got excited because my chainsaw sharpening kit came in a week early.

Now it’s on. Old Guy Stuff.

I have two giant stumps from 80-year-old oak trees right in the middle of my lawn. I have to drive around them every time I cut the grass. Drive around them? Who has time for that? All that lefting and righting with the wheel. Anywho, I’ve gotten sick of looking at them too, as they are rather unsightly.

Before QuaranTimes, I had gotten stump-pulling quotes at $800 each. Umm, no.

Then I found a few homesteaders on The YouTube who burned their stumps into the ground. But they had homesteads and could let their fires burn for days. Sure, I’m rural now, but I have people around, in a forest that just experienced a massive caterpillar raid that left 90 percent of the oaks in my yard standing dead. Add to that the 478 Nor’Easters we’ve had in the last two years, and now there’s a forest’s worth of prime kindling in the wooded half of my backyard.

In an effort to torch up some kindling, I decided to follow suit with a little Homestead Lite and burn my stump. So I burned about 87 years’ worth of campfires in my stump hole one weekend and managed to get rid of about a half-inch of The Stump.

In full flannel, I went about the business of cutting this thing up – or trying to at least. I cut straight down. Sideways. Diagonally. Woodchips and sawdust flew about the yard as if I were sculpting a grizzly bear statue at a lumberjack convention at the Montana Marriott.

The sawdust turned to dust-dust and it started smoking and smelled like the campfire was starting on its own. That’s when I knew my chains were toast.

I made progress though, cutting off four giant root tops and a few awkward sideways slices off the top.

For good measure, I even drilled a few holes in the thing, down from the top and into the side to create a mini jet-stream backdraft firenado that would hopefully burn the stump in minutes.

Yeah, that didn’t happen.

After a few minutes online, I discovered that buying a chainsaw chain every time one got dull was cost prohibitive. After a few more minutes, I discovered that you can never, for whatever reason, call a chainsaw chain a chainsaw “blade.” You will be laughed and ridiculed right out of the forest. This has been a public service announcement from the Greater Voluntown Metro Area. You’re welcome.

My kit came in on a Friday, and what could be more exciting than getting a sharpening kit ahead of a Saturday Night Stump Burn heretofore known as StumpPhest 2020? I’ll get to that later.

So it was a big night in my garage. The beer was cold. The files were sharp. The chains got super cutty.

Saturday morning I had a go at The Stump.

I donned my lumberjack gear and started cutting. And cutting. And more cutting. After 10 minutes, dust.

More dust. Smoke. More sharpening. And filing. Filing. And sharpening.

I did this process three times and barely got anywhere. Clearly this 80-year-old stump had petrified into granite and it was laughing at my efforts, dulling my chains in minutes.

Side Note: There is hardly a finer smell in the world than chainsaw exhaust, bar oil, and fresh sawdust.

That’s my kinda aromatherapy. If you use the premixed stuff, it even smells like rally cars.

Sure, The Stump almost killed both of my chainsaws – the big and the little guy – and my willingness to sharpen things 50 times a day. So I got primal. I drilled more holes and cut some haphazard slices and filled them with Space Shuttle fuel, then a few neighbors wandered over for the first edition of StumpPhest 2020.

I had plenty of wood fuel from storms of yore, so we stacked on the logs and twigs and sticks and bark, grabbed the hose, and let’er rip.

But The Stump stumped me.

Now, with the shear number of logs we blew through that first night, I expected a giant divot in my yard akin to the Meteor Crater in Starman. This was not the case.

We took off a few inches both from the top and around the perimeter, but clearly The Stump was a fighter and StumpPhest is now a regular neighborhood feature. Every couple of weeks, I drill more holes, gather up more firewood from the yard, and splash a little uranium in for inspiration. Each week, The Stump gets smaller and smaller, but it’s taken on that Devil’s Tower look, which perfectly plays into my enthusiasm, because dammit, I love “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” All the booping and beeping going on in the empty plains on that Jumbotron-looking thing and Richard Dreyfus making mashed potato towers and the like, it’s great stuff.

While The Stump has proven a worthy adversary, and one could view this burning of The Stump thing as a nuisance, what I learned was we started getting closer with our neighbors in a time when we all needed to be physically distant.

So the negative has turned positive in this microwaved evolution. But the irony is, since this happened, my wife now wants me to move the ‘Official Fire Pit’ to where The Stump location is – so now I still have to drive around the thing with the lawn mower.

A small price to pay, I suppose, for all the good that has come from StumpPhest 020.

Kris Gove lives in Voluntown.