Anyway, let’s talk about the quote and see if we can learn something from it. The first thing we can determine from this quote is its’ age. The quote is referring to grass and fences. There has been plenty of grass all through the ages in most parts of the world, but fences have been in much shorter supply. Anyone with a couple hundred bucks a month can rent an apartment with a little bit of grass in it, and there may even be a fence somewhere that you could look over and see greener grass than is in your yard. However, you wouldn’t much care about that greener grass because you’re not some sick fiend with a biology major; no you’re just an apartment dweller who rents the apartment. You certainly don’t rent the grass, and most likely don’t even have a lawnmower to cut the grass - that’s what landlords are for. In other words it would be safe to assume that the person who first said “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” actually owned his house, grass, fence and all. He must have really cared for his yard, and no matter how much care and love he put into his grass there was always that pesky neighbor (let’s call him Wilson for the sake of argument) who had better grass than he, which he could see by looking over his fence. It also stands to reason then, that a property owner with grass and a fence who cared about how his grass looked compared to his next door neighbors grass probably didn’t actually exist until sometime in the 1800’s. Why you ask? Because before then very few people actually had next door neighbors, and the ones who did had next door neighbors who only lived next door because they worked for them and their boss always told them never to lean on the fence on the job, but that’s another story.

The quote does not make any reference to the fact of what the first person to use this quote actually did to his next door neighbors grass over the fence. Did he poison the grass in some way in a bizarre effort to make his own grass look better? Did he try to buy out his neighbors’ house and yard, claiming he was annexing it to make room for a new highway expansion? We may never actually know the answers to these important questions as they are lost for time forever, and are more or less unimportant.