Land is still wealth

No teenage boy hasn't had to cut the lawn before, it's one of the most common chores and parents can whip it out as a punishment, or put it on you as a responsibility in order to get your allowance.  But it seems like more and more people are turning to lawn services, maybe it has always been this way, but in Winnetka at least it seemed different in the past.  Back when I was in the 5th grade, I tried to start a lawn service but failed miserably because every person I gave flyers to already had "the Chalet" doing their mowing and other lawn care for them.  Many of my neighbors with smaller lawns still cut their own every once and while, but everyone with a lawn larger than the size of 2-3 of our American Studies classrooms combined has a lawn service doing it for them.  It's no question, larger yards cost more money, as does a bigger house.  What's interesting is that larger lawns also cost more to maintain, which leaves me befuddled that people wouldn't want to support a sweet 5th grade boy charging a modest $20 dollars for any size lawn.  Besides not wanting a random child to mow your lawn, paying for a high-end lawn service is yet another way to show off one's wealth, something done quite often in the north shore.  Just like in the past, as we see in the playwright The Kentucky Cycle, having a large amount of land is having wealth, which symbolizes power.  The parallel from then to now is that just like people pay to have others do their landscaping for them, landowners prior to the end of the civil war paid for slaves to work on their land.  The contrast is that instead of the immigrant workers we have now, slaves were the labor force in the past.  Whatever similarities and differences there are from then to now, it seems like an endless cycle as land still symbolizes power in these ways.