Donna Johnson Wold’s hair, which was once, in her own words, “violently red,” has long since faded to the white you’d expect of an 86-year-old grandmother.

Having lived her whole life in Minneapolis, Wold now resides in a nursing home, where she has recently been undergoing physical therapy. Every day, her husband, Al, drives five miles to visit her so the two of them can sit in the sunshine together and reminisce.

One of Mrs. Wold’s fondest memories happens to be of a relationship she had with another man more than half a century ago. She still has a few reminders of him and that time: a scrawled-upon 1950 desk diary, a music box, and a large collection of decades’ worth of Peanuts comic strips, cut out from the pages of The Minneapolis Star Tribune, many of which revolve around a pretty redhead.

The strips have a special significance for Mrs. Wold. Around the peak of its popularity, Peanuts was published in 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries in 21 languages with a readership of 355 million. And yet, every now and then, it was a secret romantic correspondence, imbued with a hidden meaning only truly understood by its creator and one other person.

“It was the story of his life and mine,” Mrs. Wold says.

In the Peanuts Sunday strip that ran on November 19, 1961, Charlie Brown sits down to lunch, as usual, accompanied only by his abundant anxieties. He watches longingly as the other children enjoy themselves, laments his aloneness and unpopularity, and despairs over the lunch that he finds packed for him: a peanut-butter sandwich and a banana.

And, for the first time, he glimpses someone new in the schoolyard. “I’d give anything in the world if that little girl with the red hair would come over, and sit with me,” he says, to no one in particular.

For the remainder of the 17,897 Peanuts strips that Charles M. Schulz drew between 1950 and 1999, Charlie Brown pined for the little girl with the red hair. Like the yanked-away football and the kite-eating tree, the unattainable Little Red-Haired Girl, who shows little sign of knowing Charlie Brown exists, became a recurring motif of the character’s misery. The first definitive Schulz biography linked the character to Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved and the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets; Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson pointed to the importance of the “perpetual theme of unrequited love” in the strip (along with its “bleak undercurrent of cruelty, loneliness and failure”). In “Sartre and Peanuts,” one philosophical essayist suggested that Charlie Brown’s predicament was the essence of existentialism: “The very possibility that he could go over and talk to her is far more distressing than its impossibility would be.”

Even more profoundly, the Little Red-Haired Girl is never seen. Like Godot, she is permanently offstage in the absurd drama of Peanuts, forever lingering on the sidelines of Charlie Brown’s long, dark lunchtime of the soul. We don’t lay our eyes on her, even as he can’t take his off her.

There was, sort of, one exception. On May 25, 1998, the Little Red-Haired Girl appears, in silhouette, dancing with a besuited Snoopy, the beagle naturally fantasizing himself into the role of a resplendent Jay Gatsby dancing with his Daisy. Charlie Brown looks on, having missed his chance yet again.

Courtesy of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, Santa Rosa, California.

This November, the Little Red-Haired Girl will finally be coaxed out of the shadows. Along with the more instantly familiar faces from Schulz’s strip, she has been brought to C.G.I. life for The Peanuts Movie.