The north node is where the Moon's orbit crosses the ecliptic going north, and there are two of them in ordinary use.
The mean node is the position of a smoothed, uniformly moving orbit. It regresses at a constant rate, completing a circuit in about 18.6 years, which works out at roughly 19 degrees and 20 minutes a year, or about 3 minutes of arc a day. It is always retrograde and it never stops.
The true node, sometimes called the osculating node, is the instantaneous crossing point of the Moon's actual orbit, and it wobbles. Solar perturbation swings it back and forth around the mean position by more than a degree on a period of roughly a fortnight, and the swing is enough that the true node is briefly direct in motion for a few days at a time, several times a year. Two ephemerides can therefore disagree about the node by a degree or more, and about its direction of travel, without either being wrong; they are reporting different quantities.
The nodes matter astronomically because eclipses happen only near them. A new moon within roughly fifteen to eighteen degrees of a node produces a solar eclipse and a full moon within about twelve degrees a lunar one, so eclipses come in seasons about 173 days apart, half an eclipse year of 346.62 days. That interval, and not any doctrine, is why the nodal axis is the eclipse axis.