Remember your landline? In these Massachusetts households, they’ve never stopped ringing.

It was 6 p.m. on a school night, and 10-year-old Wanda was talking on the phone with a friend. It would have been an unremarkable scene if not for the phone itself: a retro-style black contraption with a rotary dial made of bronze and this thing called a telephone line snaking its way to a jack in the wall.

It looked more appropriate for 1954 than 2024.

“Are you still here?” she said into the receiver, trying to execute a three-way call. “Okay, good. Hang on.” Supervising the tête-à-tête was her mother, Jordyne Wu, who had the landline phone installed in their Chestnut Hill home in December as a way to teach her children communication skills before they are ready for cell phones. (The vintage aesthetic, she said, was a bonus).

It’s an analog routine that many predicted would not make it to Wanda’s generation as cell phones came on the scene, instead destined for the same fate as VCRs and 8-tracks. But despite being sentenced long ago to technological obsolescence, household landlines have stubbornly stuck around. This is particularly true in the Northeast, where 42 percent of adults lived in a house with a landline in 2022 — the highest share of any region in the country, per the latest data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

It’s true that landlines are now far outnumbered by their mobile counterparts; there were 7.8 million cell phone subscriptions in Massachusetts as of June 2022, compared to 1.3 million residential landlines (either classic switched access lines or ‘voice over internet protocol’ subscriptions that require a broadband connection to place a call), according to the Federal Communications Commission.

But landline loyalists, while they do tend to skew older, are far from Luddites. In interviews, more than a dozen Massachusetts residents who have hung onto their handsets — and, all of whom also have cell phones — cited safety, comfort, and simplicity as factors for why they haven’t cut the cord (or cordless).

“It’s like stability,” said Kirk Shilts, a 63-year old chiropractor who lives in Hingham. “In this day and age where we move around so often, it’s home base.”

And in rare instances when cellular coverage is down — such as during the widespread AT&T outage last Thursday — landlines exact their comeuppance: they are still more effective at transmitting location information to first responders than cell phones in most cases, according to the Massachusetts 911 Department.

“The phone was always the thing that was always your security,” said Brenda Sheridan, 56, who has a landline in part as a defense against spotty cell reception at her home in Swampscott. “The fact that that can all go away in a second is just disturbing.”

That’s also the fear for Matt Hayes, who often finds himself with unreliable wireless service in Newton. His landline gives him the peace of mind that if something were to happen in the middle of the night with his mother or mother-in-law — both of whom are in their nineties — he would be reachable.

“It’s more of, pardon the expression, a lifeline,” said Hayes, 66.

For Talia Weisberg, a 28-year-old Cambridge resident (and a rare millennial user), having a landline is a matter of comfort. Her Panasonic cordless handset is more ergonomic for drawn-out talks with her mother than her cell phone, she said, and it’s also a crisper connection. “It’s just a much more pleasant long conversation experience,” she said.

Spencer Ross, of Burlington, said his landline is more comfortable for calls than the “square brick rectangle” of a smartphone. But he also feels that landlines invite a certain serendipity into the household. If his in-laws call the house phone looking for his wife, for instance, he or one of his kids might pick up first, leading to an impromptu catch-up.

“I know it’s a minuscule element of societal convention,” said Ross, 41, “but it still draws those connections and strengthens some of those connections that you otherwise don’t have just by calling somebody directly.”

Indeed, the shift away from landlines turned what was once a shared resource for the family unit into an individual device, which many believe creates a sense of isolation, said Josh Lauer, an associate professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire who is researching a book on the cultural history of the telephone. Patience for one’s turn to dial has given way to screen-facilitated instant gratification; long calls have turned into text threads.

“Thinking about telephone communication as a shared technology is different than the way that we think about it now as being a personal technology, a private technology,” he said. “That has all kinds of implications for the way that we interact with other people.”

Ironically, for some, the landline represents an attempt to reclaim the communication expectations of yore, when users had a cords-length distance from their devices. Just ask Paige Arnof-Fenn, 58, of Cambridge, whose five cordless landlines throughout her house serve as her main method of communication. Arnof-Fenn, who runs a branding and marketing communications firm out of her house, also has a Verizon flip phone, but that’s more as an “emergency backup,” she said.

“I’m not a heart surgeon — no one’s going to die if I don’t return the call for an hour or a day,” she said. “I just don’t need to be that reachable. If I don’t pick up, there’s usually a pretty good reason for it.”

Of course, sentimentality also plays a part in the endurance of landlines. Who doesn’t have a pang of nostalgia for Sunday night calls to grandparents, or earpieces held close for privacy from prying siblings?

Barbara Kerr, a Newton resident, is loath to give up the home phone number that she inherited from her late uncle, and which has been in the family for at least 80 years. Shilts, the Hingham resident, also sees his area code number as a shorthand for his locality, his identity. It suggests some permanence.

“That landline celebrates that,” he said, “where my cell phone is like, whatever.”

It remains to be seen how long this attitude will survive in a world increasingly dominated by digital nomads. None of those who spoke to the Globe had plans to ditch their landlines anytime soon.

On TikTok, landlines exist as little more than a punchline, with several videos showing Gen Zers fumbling over the handsets. Some 20-somethings, however, have embraced them on social media as a novelty item, in line with affection for other retro gadgets, such as record players or digital cameras.

Back in Chestnut Hill, Wu said the one discouraging part of her experiment is that so few of her kids’ classmates have access to landlines. “It’s really hard when there’s no one else answering the phone,” said Wu.

Wanda, for her part, says she uses the family’s new rotary phone every day. She has arranged playdates, rung her grandparents to ask if she can stop by for breakfast, and prank called boys in her class. She said she likes it well enough — for now.

“I would rather have a normal phone, though,” she said.