If you would like a Spanish visa, begin here. This is the first photo I have ever uploaded to my blog. Because a picture is worth a thousand words. Because you can’t possibly understand.

This is my living room floor. And one member of my family’s paperwork for a visa application. One.

There are five of us.

This is only ninety percent complete. We are still waiting for the two most important papers of all. The one that says I have a job in Spain. And the one that says we’re not criminals.

We are not criminals. We are five people connected by a thought I had when I was a heartbroken nineteen-year-old freshman in college. The thought? I will teach ESL. I will marry someone. And I will take my family to a Spanish-speaking country so that my children will learn Spanish.

What you don’t think of when you…